On 2021's very personal
Home Video,
Lucy Dacus looked back upon her coming-of-age experiences, with results that were vulnerable, touching, and occasionally tinged with regret. In the four years before releasing her next solo album,
Boygenius -- her band with fellow late-millennial singer/songwriters
Phoebe Bridgers and
Julien Baker -- blew up, topping the album chart in the U.K., hitting the U.S. Top Five, and selling out a show at Madison Square Garden. With a larger fan base for her solo music lying in wait, she makes her major-label debut on
Geffen Records with
Forever Is a Feeling. Unlike
Home Video, it finds
Dacus all grown up, examining "it's complicated" relationships through an adult lens on songs that are no less personal, vulnerable, or touching. Produced by
Dacus and
Blake Mills, its more expansive sound includes appearances by
Mills on several instruments, her
Boygenius bandmates (backing vocals),
Madison Cunningham (guitars),
Phoenix Rousiamanis (violin, keyboards),
Bartees Strange, and
Jay Som's
Melina Duterte, among others. None other than
Hozier has the album's one featured spot, on the duet "Bullseye," a tender, acoustic guitar- and pedal steel-based recollection of a love with no regrets, even though the relationship ended. The album as a whole is tender and affectionate, seeming to accept and appreciate even the awkward and unrequited as part of her embrace of complexity and queerness. The 13 tracks here do take different forms, though, including an opening, dissonant "Calliope Prelude"; the suspenseful piano and strings on the cabaret-like "Limerence" ("I want what we have, our beautiful life/But the stillness, the stillness, might eat me alive"); the stomping, oversaturated textures of "Talk" ("Why can't we talk anymore?"); and the midtempo rock of "Most Wanted Man," whose heavier guitar tones are almost
Beatlesque. While remaining relatively mellow in tone, the album's title track is an obvious centerpiece featuring
Bridgers and
Baker,
Mills' bass,
Cunningham's 12-string guitar,
Duerte's drum programming and synths,
Strange's additional drums, and several other components pieced together by five engineers and including harp and gamelan players. It temporarily changes keys and passes through several emotional contradictions on the way to deciding she's in the relationship for the long haul.
Forever Is a Feeling closes, significantly, with "Lost Time," a song whose sparse-bulky-sparse structure emphasizes her regret at not saying those three little words sooner. In the end, she manages to subtly dramatize her music without betraying the quiet honesty she's already known and beloved for. ~ Marcy Donelson
