More significant to her life and musical development is her mother. Dacus’s mom is a teacher and pianist who has worked as an accompanist for church and musicals, and she gave Dacus her first piano lessons when she was five. However, piano lessons didn’t last long. “She would say ‘this is a C,’ and I would say ‘no, it’s not.’ She’d say, ‘you little bitch, I’m not going to teach you how to play the piano.’ I mean, she wouldn’t say ‘you little bitch’, but I was a little bitch because she’s an adult woman who does that for her job, and I’m just a five-year-old.”

Shortly after attempting to play piano, Dacus began playing guitar. “I never took lessons. I still don’t know shit about guitar, but it’s done me right.” Whatever teacher-student relationship ended between Dacus and her mother after the failed piano lessons, the support of her mother has been there from Dacus’s early songwriting efforts. “I won second place in a contest in maybe second grade — a songwriting contest at my school. It was for heroes, and I think I wrote about Mother Earth as a ‘hero,’ and the lyrics were something like:

I hold in my hand a patch of dirt
I hold in my hand a beautiful flower
I hold in my hand pebbles and rocks

You know, something like ‘I’m seven years old, and I wrote a song.’ I remember the winner was in kindergarten and wrote a song about firefighters, and it was not as good, and I remember my mom being like, ‘you should have won the first place! That firefighter song was shit!’ She wouldn’t have said shit; I keep making her cruder than she is. But she was like, ‘you should have won first place.’”

Lucy Dacus has grown a lot since those early, second-place songs. For her, songwriting was never a plan or the end goal: it was just a part of life. “I never wanted to be a songwriter in a professional way,” she confesses. “I think I always thought that I was a songwriter, and that was fine. I was as much a songwriter as a kid as I am now, and that’s all I ever expected it to be. I didn’t even think that this was a possible job until the year of doing this job. I never thought that it was an option.” 

The option emerged after Dacus went on tour and ended it with a profit. “I used to go on tour for fun. I’d go with friends, and it was a lot of fun to sleep on people’s floors, and meet people, and have fun, and simply lose money because the only money you’re making are tips in a basement, since someone’s passing around a bucket during the show. But in 2016, after the No Burden tour, I had enough money at the end of it to pay my rent. My rent at the time was $195, but still, I could live on it! It was a total surprise.”

With gigs on the horizon, including a recently announced string of shows supporting Bright Eyes, and a full tour of her own supported by Bartees Strange, there is a lot more than a basement-show tip-bucket for Dacus to look forward to. Admirers of emotionally challenging indie rock can rest assured that Dacus will guard the torch and its sacred fire.