Richmond, VA-based songwriter Lucy Dacus is the latest addition to the renowned Matador Records / Remote Control Records roster. The 21-year-old’s critically acclaimed debut album, No Burden, which was released earlier this year, is out now digitally, with a re-pressing of CD and LP out Friday 9 September.
For a behind-the-scenes look at Lucy’s life on the road, which includes recent headlining shows, SXSW, and dates with Daughter and Julien Baker, a new video set to ‘I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore’ can be viewed below.
No Burden is full of surprises—sharp lyrical observations, playful turns of musical phrase, hooks that’ll embed themselves in your frontal lobe for days. But the most surprising thing about this album might be the fact that it’s a debut; it has a keen sense of self about it, and it nearly glows from the self-possession held by the woman at its core.
The 21-year-old Dacus grew up in Richmond; she was adopted at a young age, an experience that informed her curious, openhearted songwriting. “When my parents were explaining what adoption was—which was very early on in my childhood—they always said that my birthmother thought I was worthwhile even though she couldn’t be my mom,” she says. “And so from essentially infancy, I was taught that life was innately worthwhile because a bunch of people had worked together to set me up with one.”
Dacus started playing around Richmond while in college, opening for local acts and eventually meeting Jacob Blizard, a guitarist who invited her to make a record for a college project of his. No Burden, which originally came out in February on the Richmond label EggHunt Records, opens with the forthright, almost brutally honest ‘I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore,’ the last song Dacus wrote before the album’s day-long recording session at Starstruck Studios in Nashville. Dacus delivers scalpel-sharp observations about resisting pigeonholing over chunky guitars, ticking off ideals of femininity and youth until the track’s not-quite-resolution.