Nothing ruins Mother’s Day quite like the death of one’s own mother. I suspect that the month of May has been ruined for me forever, that I’ll be averting my eyes from pastel window-dressings every spring until the good Lord takes me. A friend of mine struggles similarly with Halloween. And no holiday is more fraught, in this era of child separation and travel bans, than the Fourth of July. Taylor Swift went so far as to cancel her party this year, citing a “disillusionment with her country.”
Fittingly, in the holiday singles of her 2019 EP, Lucy Dacus isn’t throwing a party. She adopts a tone similar to Sufjan Stevens’ yuletide songs, sifting through the kitschy refuse of culture for little sentiments only she knows how to share. Mother’s Day becomes a moment to reflect on and heal from generations of matrilineal trauma. The opening lyric of “My Mother & I”—“My mother hates her body/We share the same outline/She swears she loves mine”—never sounded more gorgeous than when she performed the song alongside her own mother, during a Mother’s Day show in Asheville. On “Fool’s Gold,” New Year’s Eve fades into New Year’s Day, and Dacus sits alone and anxious in the ruins of the party she threw. And the Fourth, her favorite holiday, loses its luster as she asks listeners to consider their own complicity in American atrocities. She treats her weighty subjects with careful concision: short lines, simple phrasing. These are among the best songs she’s ever written.
For a host of other holidays, she opts for covers over original compositions, from a wry Halloween rendition of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight”—according to her, “the best eerie bop of all time”—to a swooning, utterly sincere take on the Valentine’s Day standard, “La Vie en Rose,” sung first in French and then in English. Dacus’ singular voice—the warm, honeyed quality of her lower register, especially—sounds even better spilling over French syllables than English ones.
Her greatest effort, though, is a punchy romp through Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” recorded for the Boss’ birthday. In a recent essay titled “The Queerness of Bruce Springsteen,” critic Naomi Gordon-Loebl praised Bruce as something of a dykon, “so practiced and so precise that he might as well have learned it from the oldest lesbian at a gay bar.” There’s a special thrill, then, in hearing one of his standards rendered so lovingly by a queer woman like Dacus, especially given the long years she spent “in denial” about her sexuality. She comes closest to really celebrating when she’s channeling Springsteen; it’s the sound of a young woman who’s wanted to throw her arms around another girl for the longest time finally allowing herself to do so.
The collection’s one real dud is a riff on “Last Christmas,” which sounds, to borrow Dacus’s own phrasing, “a tad psychotic.” The fast, furious pace of the arrangement is meant to draw out the song’s long shadows, but it’s got about as much bite as one of those mid-2000s Punk Goes Pop compilations. Still, a single misstep in a year full of superb work is easy to overlook, and her “Last Christmas” is far from the most cringe-worthy offering of the season. Dacus intended 2019 EP as something of a diversion from her usual work, a series of stand-alones intended to flex new musical muscles. Perfect as these songs are for our moment, there’s an unmistakable staying power to them, too.
Buy: Rough Trade
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