It’s been five years since Lucy Dacus last performed at the WYEP Studios and now she’s back to talk about her new single “Kissing Lessons.”
The upbeat single might feel like a bit of a departure from her last album, “Home Video,” but it was actually cut from the album.
“It (Kissing Lessons) was just way more fun,” Dacus said. “It wasn’t that we cut it because it wasn’t good. It was actually the favorite of my producers and the band. But it’s just like kind of a bop and the rest of the record was a little soft and contemplative.”
“Kissing Lessons” was inspired by a true story, that of 7-year-old Dacus learning how to kiss from her neighborhood friends.
“Not thinking in any way, ‘oh, this is gay,’ we were just preparing for our future men,” she said. “Now, since coming out, I look back at that through a different lens.”
Dacus is also an avid journal keeper, regularly jotting down memories such as this.
“I feel like journaling is kind of like an impulse that I have to follow through on, it’s not so that I have written journals,” she said. “It’s more about the action of figuring out what I think and putting it to paper. I don’t usually revisit them. I just started to for the first time two years ago, really.”
She has learned one thing since reading her old journals.
“It’s been a trip realizing how much I’ve changed,” she said.
One change is how she approaches making music since working with Phoebe Bridgers and Julian Baker for the collaborative boygenius.
“I feel like I’ve had the feeling of freedom since working with them, just seeing how they do things and realizing that I can make songs in many different ways,” she said.
