When I got a chance to speak with Lucy Dacus right before she headed out on her “Forever Is a Feeling” tour, I learned that a Milwaukee stop wasn’t in the initial tour schedule. Then I found out that Lucy personally changed her plans out of a deep fondness for our city and its people — but especially for Lake Michigan.
We also talked about the special additions to her live band (see and hear the magic of what she calls “horror violin”), and how art plays a huge role in her life and work, inspired partially by her graphic-designer father. Curious to learn what comfort items from home will make it on the tour bus this time around? She told me all about that, too!
Did I ask her what her childhood smelled like? Of course I did — and I got three very cool answers.
Check out the full interview using the player on this page, and if you somehow didn’t get your tickets for this Sunday’s concert at the Riverside Theater, there are still some available. Make sure you get there early, too, to catch fellow 88Nine favorite Jay Som opening the show.
The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Lucy Dacus interview highlights
On why she switched up her tour schedule to include Milwaukee:
In 2018, I was opening for … the Decemberists? Yes. I do remember that. And I remember going on a really beautiful walk, and I'm pulling up my Google Maps right now to try and find it. … Was it Veterans Park or was it … let me see … yep, Veterans Park is right on the lake by the art museum. Just a big, beautiful, open space.
It might have been that just going to the lake, I mean, you're used to it and anyone in your town listening to this is used to it. But that's crazy. Those lakes are insane. They look like an ocean. My idea of a lake is you can see the full perimeter of it, like basically a pond. .. Lakes are like, if somebody has a lake house, I can see the other side of it. On the other side is where you take the canoe to go to the bar in the evening. [Lake Michigan] very much inspires a sense of vastness that's kind of existential. Looking at a great lake. How is this not an ocean?
So in 2018, I went on a really gorgeous walk by the lake. I actually will say Milwaukee was not on this tour and was not on any tour that is coming up, and I was like, “I would like to go back to Milwaukee,” and we rerouted the tour in order to go. I don't even exactly know why. I was just like, “I don't wanna miss out on that.”
On the cover for new album Forever Is a Feeling:
It took Will St. John somewhere between two and four months. I know that's a big difference, but I think we took the photo in June, and it might've been finished in October. … Seeing the painting in person is amazing because it really looks like a photograph or it has this soft meme that looks almost digital. There's actually a lot of people who assumed that it was a photo or a digital rendering, and I'm like, “No. The point of this is that I hired somebody who can do this with their hands.”
On creating a term for a unique studio instrument:
We made these horror strings that were basically us scraping our hands and nails and different tools on piano strings. So we played it like a string instrument, even though it's a piano, and they sound very like a horror soundtrack. Everyone that opened the session after that was like, “Horror strings? What are you talking about?” It's hard to explain. It's not like an instrument … like drums or bass, but being like, “Uh, the piano strings that we played with weird objects.” Horror strings was just a concise and cute way to say what that was.
