Lucy Dacus is staring at the end of a road and admits she cannot see past it. The singer and songwriter, a member of the trio Boygenius and the author of the 2025 solo album ‘Forever Is a Feeling,’ told Interview magazine she is nearing the close of her touring cycle. ‘I love touring. I only have one left, and then I have no idea what my life looks like,’ Dacus said in a conversation with comedian Hannah Einbinder published Sept. 25.
What she expects to miss most is the band. ‘It sucks because I love my band so much. It’s really the shows that bring us together,’ Dacus said. The remark carried unusual weight for a performer who has built a reputation on candor, in her lyrics and in interviews alike. She has toured steadily for years, and the prospect of stopping left her without a ready plan for the months that follow.
That openness has limits she is only now examining. ‘Everything that I’ve shared, I’ve wanted to,’ she said. ‘But I’m starting to realize growing up religious, someone was always listening.’ Dacus, raised in a religious household, connected the old habit of feeling watched to the way she writes and performs now. She returned more than once to the raw material she keeps reaching for. ‘I’ve known since I was a kid that time is a raw material,’ she said.
Some of her recent work grew out of anger. ‘I felt really angry about Trump coming for trans rights,’ Dacus said, describing how she pushed that feeling into music rather than letting it curdle. ‘It felt like such a joyful way to transform my anger into something.’ The approach fit a writer who tends to convert private friction into songs other people can carry around with them.
Standing on her own has meant learning to defend herself the way she once defended her bandmates. ‘When it was Boygenius, I could defend Phoebe and Julien,’ Dacus said, referring to Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker. ‘That’s way easier to do than myself.’ Even so, she described a real faith in her effect on a room. ‘If I enter a space earnestly, I change it. I’m powerful in that way,’ she said. Einbinder, weighing her own eventual exit from performing, traded notes with Dacus on what a life after the work might hold.
