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Lucy Dacus “Addictions”

Lucy Dacus’ music is direct and personal in a way that can feel vaguely startling and sorta voyeuristic, like you’re reading texts or emails intended for someone who is definitely not you. The lyrics of “Addiction” in particular are so vivid and specific that your mind rushes to fill in the backstory – who’s this person she was intimate with, and what exactly made them drift apart, and what brought them back together in that car? Does she really want to get back together, or is she just torturing herself in the middle of the night? I think this is resonant at any age, but it all sounds so young to me. It’s the angst of not having a lot of personal precedent, and knowing how things go in other people’s lives and in stories but not really knowing how the narratives will form in your own life. You hold out for the patterns of other people’s lives, or rush to conclusions about how things are for you. You can hear her drift towards the latter extreme as this song goes along, with lines that sound like the beginning of self-fulfilling prophecies.

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