I Just Read About That…

[ATTENDED: October 21, 2021] Lucy Dacus

Lucy Dacus announced that she’d be playing Philly on the birthday of someone in my family.  Clearly I wasn’t going to go to the show.

That sold out pretty quickly and she announced another show the next night.   I grabbed tickets immediately.

I’ve seen Lucy two and a half times already (she played Newport Folk Festival but we only saw a couple of songs).

The only problem was that I didn’t know her new album very well yet.  The songs I knew I liked, but I hadn’t really dived into the rest of it.  And this set was heavy on the Home Video.

It was kind of neat that at the beginning of the show she had a loop playing of her own home movies.  There were clips of Lucy at various ages through her life.  I was kind of surprised the loop was so short (I recently found out that she’s only 26, so that explains that).

The first part of the set was pretty heavy on new songs, but she nicely threw in a couple of songs from Historian (the album I know best).  Apparently we got two more Historian songs than the night before, so that’s cool.

But the crowd knew everything about the new album and they sang along with everything.  I felt a little bad not knowing these songs, but i did enjoy them.

I was also probably the only person disappointed to hear her play “Dancing in the Dark” my least favorite Bruce Springsteen song (I’d have preferred “La Vie en Rose”) although I do like Lucy’s version of Bruce’s song better.

“Partner in Crime” was played as a solo acoustic song (evidently on night one is was played like on the record as an autotuned rager).

This version of “Thumbs” may have been more intense than the first one.  Possibly because we all knew it, and possibly because she has now sung it enough to have really internalized it.

The ending song “Going Going Gone” is a big sing along and she brought out the Bartees Strange band to sing along.  So that was pretty fun.

Lucy doesn’t play much from her debut album anymore, but the rocker “I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore” is a crowd favorite and she seems to really enjoy playing it.  But the crowd really got into “Night Shift,” an anthemic song that sounds better every time I hear it.  Having a roomful of people singing this kiss-off song must be incredibly cathartic for her.  I know it is for me.

For an encore she played “Triple Dog Dare” and then when the band left, she told us that she was going to play an unreleased song–one that she pretty much only finished in the last couple of days.  She said that when she was touring last, she played “Thumbs” and asked no one to record it because it wasn’t out yet.  She thanked everyone for obeying her wishes because evidently the song never leaked and she felt comfortable doing it again.

She sang a different song on the first night and our song (set in San Francisco) was beautiful.

Lucy is playing another local show (at The Stone Pony) in February, but I’m not able to go and that’s probably just as well.

Ô Home Video (2021)
ℵ 2019 (2019)
⇔ Historian (2018)
⊗ No Burden (2016)