With attention to detail, songwriter Lucy Dacus draws acclaim while getting uncomfortable

Acclaimed Richmond, Va.-based indie-folk-rock artist Lucy Dacus wasn’t groomed for a life in music, but her parents never deterred her creativity. Making up her own music was just always part of her life.

“The real answer is I never stopped writing songs,” Dacus says. “I feel like kids write songs when they’re younger all the time, in the grocery cart or while they’re playing or walking around. Parents tell them that it’s annoying, or to be quiet. Unnaturally, you lose your natural inclination to make up music. My parents didn’t do that.”

Now 24 — her birthday was Thursday — Dacus has two albums under her belt and is part of the indie supergroup boygenius with fellow much-buzzed-about female indie songwriters Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker. Boygenius topped Pitchfork’s 2018 reader’s poll of best new bands, while last year’s solo effort “Historian” landed her on Paste magazine’s list of the best albums of 2018.

Dacus got her first guitar in middle school.

“I’d bring it to sleepovers and we’d write songs to our crushes and contemplate handing them the lyrics at school on Monday, but none of us wanted to be musicians,” she recalls. Somewhere between slumber parties and graduation, that changed for Dacus. In high school, one of her teachers encouraged her to bring her guitar to school.

“I was that guy with the acoustic guitar in the hallways,” she says with a laugh. “I went to a nerd high school that you had to test into. At lunch people would gather and sing.” While campfire sing-alongs around the lunch table may sound odd, Dacus says it served as an icebreaker for socially awkward kids.

“It’s the ultimate example of music. I think it came out of being uncomfortable. Everyone wanted an excuse to talk.”

Broaching the uncomfortable still fuels Dacus’s writing.

On “Historian,” Dacus tackles loss and its aftermath, in topics from from lost love to loss of direction to death. She doesn’t beat the listener over the head with questions of mortality; she eases into them, shining lyrical light on the details that make her work relatable.

“Night Shift,” for instance, begins with the couplet: “The first time I tasted somebody else’s spit / I had a coughing fit / I mistakenly called them by your name / I was let down, it wasn’t the same.”

She explains: “I dated someone for five years and the first person I kissed after, it was horrible. That song began there — this confusing, specific detail that made me feel a certain way.” The song transitions from a quiet opening to become a six-minute-long rock opus. “At the end, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s good to be moving on, and in another five years the song will have nothing to do with my old partner.”

With “Historian,” “I wanted to ease people into talking about their own death by talking about loss of home, identity, friend and life. I prefer time and melody to lead the way.”