Lucy Dacus takes House of Blues down memory lane on her Home Video tour
By Maura Cowan
Lucy Dacus arrived in Boston on a gust of sparkling autumn wind– there is that sort of quality about her that makes her presence anywhere just a little bit magic. As the sun set over the city, that enchantment began to settle into the corners of the Fenway district’s House of Blues.
Dacus is far from a novice performer, but touring her third album Home Video has brought her to new heights. With a shy grin and a nod to the crowd, she announced that House of Blues is the biggest venue she’s ever headlined. The size of the house, however, could never infringe upon the intimacy of the night.
Opener Bartees Strange kicked off the evening with selections from his first LP, Live Forever (2020). Despite just beginning to emerge in the indie rock scene, he has contributed a style that is distinctly his own, combining elements of rock, soul, blues, and hip-hop and delivering a bouncy, energetic performance. By the time he closed his set with the celebratory, up-tempo track “Boomer,” the crowd was humming with anticipation that crescendoed into a roar as Dacus took the stage.
In a satisfying act of balance, Dacus chose to open the night with Home Video’s closing track, “Triple Dog Dare”. It was an ambitious choice– the song is over eight minutes long and remains musically understated until it bursts to life in the final verse. With this quiet, though, she did exactly what she needed to do, utterly captivating the house. Framed in a wash of light with a simple animated camcorder cycling behind her, standing in a flowing blue gown with cloud-puff sleeves, it seemed as though an angel had appeared before the crowd.
Dacus is not a loud or boisterous presence, but onstage, she carried a sweet and commanding dignity that gripped the audience’s attention even during the quieter periods. Throughout the night, she made each moment her own with little touches of perfection: clips of herself as a child broadcasted above the stage, a cover of “La Vie En Rose” with a rocker’s flair, brief interludes between songs wherein she chatted to the crowd with familiarity and sipped her nightly cup of Throat Coat tea.
The crowd reacted to her grace in kind, weaving intense lyric-screaming enthusiasm with moments of calm and even stillness. Twice, the entire audience seemed to hold its breath, letting her voice ring out into the hall alone; once during the gut-wrenching plea for life, “Please Stay,” and again during the visceral, quiet fury of “Thumbs,” where Dacus fantasizes about killing a friend’s abusive father.
Despite the heavy themes present in some of Dacus’ work, most of the night was filled with far more joy than tears. As the show drew near its close, she brought the whole band up front and called out the Bartees Strange crew for a rendition of self-described “campfire sing-along” favorite “Going, Going, Gone.” With the performers laughing together and calling to the audience in a perfect sort of warmth, it was easy to imagine that everyone in the room was the best of friends, getting ready to turn in after a comfortable evening.
Really, though, there was only ever one way Dacus could have finished the night. A wave of catharsis overtook the crowd as the opening bars of her 2018 hit “Night Shift” rang out into the house, and for perhaps the only time in the evening, every single note was amplified in a glorious chorus: “You’ve got a nine to five, so I’ll take the night shift/ and I’ll never see you again if I can help it/ In five years, I hope the songs feel like covers/ dedicated to new lovers.”
There was the palpable feeling that those words meant something deeply and uniquely personal to everyone in the crowd. By her last refrain, the years of car-radio screams and breakup breakdowns seemed to swirl in the air with the audience’s cries.
“Wow,” she remarked in between the final dregs of her tea, “That was amazing. Y’all were feral.”
After a brief moment off stage, she returned for an encore with a rousing cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” a favorite of the fathers and New Jerseyans in the audience. The night, however, was not over yet. When she toured her sophomore album, Historian, Dacus introduced an as-yet-untitled song (which later became “Thumbs”), with the simple request that no one record the performance and release it to the Wild West of the internet. Secure in that venture’s success, she decided to entrust the crowd once again with a new piece.
“If you see someone else recording, feel free to bully them,” she quipped with half a smile at the shuffle of the audience tucking away phones and cameras. For a final time, the entire house held one collective breath. In the warmth of the room and the company of hundreds of strangers in harmony, they gave her every bit of air.