Lucy Dacus’ success story could be considered one small antidote to a year when even the music news cycle has been unusually gloomy. Just nine months ago, the Richmond, Virginia-based singer/songwriter released her debut single, “I Don’t Want to Be Funny Anymore.” An album, No Burden, followed in February via Dacus’ hometown label EggHunt Records and earned glowing reviews. By late spring, she’d signed to Matador. With No Burden scheduled for reissue September 9, Dacus is still gaining momentum. In a single weekend at the end of July, she appeared at Lollapalooza, in an NPR “Tiny Desk Concert,” and on “CBS This Morning.”
It’s easy to see why the 21-year-old’s star has risen so quickly. Her songs walk a line between grunge-indebted indie rock and alt-country, with the appealing warmth of Neko Case and, as many critics have noted, the self-deprecating wit of Courtney Barnett. More importantly, she has a voice we haven’t quite heard before—a twangy alto that sounds light and limber despite its depth—and a unique talent for encapsulating the emotional truth of a moment in impressionistic lyrics that feel effortless. “Without you, I am surely the last of our kind,” she sings on “Dream State...,” evoking the isolation that follows the end of a relationship with disarming concision. Dacus is the kind of artist who could easily break through to the mainstream, but even if she never ascends to the top of any chart, her timeless sound carries the promise of a long career.
The music industry must think so, too; Dacus began fielding inquiries from labels practically the moment “I Don’t Want to Be Funny Anymore” premiered late last year. From there, she spent a tumultuous six months meeting potential team members, consulting veteran musicians, vetting offers, and tempering her excitement with caution. A smart, young artist hoping to secure a sustainable career for herself and her bandmates, Dacus wouldn’t have been satisfied with one quick shot at fame. Though she’s still caught in the whirlwind of No Burden’s extended life, she’s already looking to the future, anxious to record the “more unified” second album she’s written. “There was a day in the van when we were out on tour last month where I typed up all the lyrics and read them and realized, if I put them in a certain sequence, it has this really logical arc,” she says. “I got really stoked about it.”
During a ten-hour drive from Chicago to South Dakota, Dacus told the story of what it’s like to have 20 labels fighting to sign you.
We made No Burden because Jacob Blizard, our guitarist, went to Oberlin and they have this program where you have to do a project over winter break. So the album was his winter project. We went to Nashville because our mutual friend Collin Pastore was working at a studio there. We got some of Collin’s friends from Berklee, where he went to school, to play drums and bass, and we wrote all of their parts in three or four practices before recording. We recorded pretty much the whole album in one day and then did harmonies and overdubs the next day.
I think that was possible because we had no expectations. We were like, “OK, we have this limited amount of time. We’ll just make it work, and it doesn’t really matter if it doesn’t work.” Once the album was recorded, we listened to it and realized, “This is better than we thought it was going to be.” If there were expectations, they were exceeded.
That raised some entirely new questions: How do people actually do this? How do people release albums professionally, and not just put them on Bandcamp or burn CDs from their laptops and sell them at local shows? I asked a lot of people who tour regularly—professionals from Richmond, including Tyler Williams, who’s our manager now.
The first step we took was an album-release show for a Richmond band called Manatree, on EggHunt Records. Adam Henceroth, who runs EggHunt, approached me at the show and said, “Hey, let me know if you’re ever working on an album.” I was like, “This is so well-timed because we actually just finished an album! I’ll send it to you.” He listened to it, really liked it, and said, “If I send this to pressing this week, we can get you vinyl before South by Southwest.” Once we were working with EggHunt, a timeline appeared: We’d put out a single in a couple months, and a couple months later we’d tour to Austin and back.
The first single, “I Don’t Want to Be Funny Anymore,” premiered on The Fader last November. Within hours, I got a flood of emails from labels, booking agencies, management groups, venues, publicists—every category of the industry.
I wasn’t prepared at all. I was asking a lot of questions, because there’s this narrative of female artists who are new to the business getting really excited and jumping into working relationships with people who don’t have their best interests in mind. I can see how it happens, because it felt like everyone I talked to in the industry was the coolest person ever. And it’s not like they weren’t being genuinely friendly, but it was still business. They wanted to start a relationship with me that was basically centered around money. I had to keep that at the front of my mind. It was less about being dubious of their intentions than reminding myself of what those intentions were. It just so happens that people who want to make money off you can be really sweet and kind.
Four months after we released “I Don’t Want to Be Funny Anymore,” the album came out on EggHunt. Three months after that we officially signed with Matador. That’s not a very long time: half a year between the first flood and the final signing.
That time of indecision felt very hectic. But it was nice because everything we were doing was based around this product we made, that we were proud of and other people believed in. We ended up connecting with about 20 labels—a couple majors, some large and even small indies. At the core of every conversation was lifting up this album that we wanted people to hear. Still, not knowing exactly where we were going, not knowing who our team was, not knowing who to go to with questions—that wasn’t the best.
There’s no preparing for a decision-making process like this. For lots of jobs, you can tell how they’re supposed to go. You go to school, you study, and you get the career that you learned how to do. But this was like applying for a job without knowing what the job description was. And then once you get the job, your life changes in ways you didn’t expect.
I don’t know if we did it right, or if there is a way to do it right. The decision turned out well, but for half a year, I felt like I was spinning in circles—feeling really decided one way, and then a new thing would come up and I’d feel really decided in a different direction. It was my decision, but I was also considering this whole band of people who were dedicating their time and their lives to touring and playing this music. I’d never had that much responsibility in my life.
I held off on making decisions until I’d had conversations with lots of different people. With some labels, I realized immediately: That’s not what we’re looking for. There was a label that said they wanted to help me find my story and present my story. It was weird. It almost implied that I didn’t have one, or that I wasn’t interesting enough. It sounded like that was something they did with all their artists: marketed them as people instead of selling the music. That’s not really the type of band we are.
Another label was a little hesitant. They were like, “We waited to reach out because we’ve taken on a lot of women recently.” It was messed up. I counted them out almost immediately. It could’ve just been a bad choice of words. Maybe they meant that they took on a lot of people who sound like me or are marketed through the same channels, which I guess is a legitimate concern. But instead they said, “We just took on a lot of women.” You know that’s not being said about four white dudes. Less than a fourth of the bands on their roster have women in them.
It was funny—I love a lot of the work that comes out of that label. But people who recognize that music sounds good still don’t necessarily know that there’s a place for, or a way to market, women.
That particular response only came up once. I thought, “Man, I guess there’s still this weird, restrictive mentality about women in music.” I hardly ever feel that because there’s so much amazing music being made by women now, but every so often there’s a little reminder.
In the end, we narrowed it down to three to five labels that we really grilled. One of the big things I would look at was their rosters. I’d ask myself: Do we fit in here? Would the people who follow this label want to hear our music? And then, more importantly, which bands on each label have had longevity in their careers?
That’s one of the huge reasons we ended up choosing Matador. I was thinking about which labels sustain artists instead of just picking up what’s trendy. I heard during our label-searching that some labels hire statisticians instead of A&R people. They’ll reach out to the bands that will statistically perform best monetarily, instead of going out to shows and having an opinion on which music is good or bad.
There are some bands on Matador that are still working, still touring, and still making really good music after decades. Yo La Tengo were a major inspiration for me, because they’re one of the first bands that I got into on my own, separate from my parents, when I was in high school. I have all their albums. That’s the place we’d like be in someday.