What The Hell America!

I first got excited about the new Lucy Dacus album when I heard it included a song called “Limerence.” The dreamiest star in indie rock’s current pantheon, Dacus is an expert in pulling out the details of experiences that start and often stay inside a person’s head: infatuation, unstaged arguments with distant lovers, nostalgia for encounters that glow in memory but maybe weren’t so great in the first place. Her new songs chronicle a love that’s come to fruition, but even as she celebrates this now public, inevitably complicated bond with her boygenius bandmate Julien Baker, Dacus still creates a particular kind of safe space for the fans who delight in swooning with her — a terrain where imagination rules in all its sparkling, hazy, mutable glory, and where desire unfolds luxuriously across meaningful silences and whispered connections.

Dacus’ music lives at the border between the crush zone and the great expanse of heartache, at those points where a relationship might take many different paths. Forever Is a Feeling, which will be out this Friday, March 28, considers how even a secure, ongoing relationship includes these junctures — not in the same tantalizing way that makes new love so addictive, but through the valleys of miscommunication, the possible routes arising when a new person enters the picture, the byways built by intense friendships or other hard-to-define emotional bonds. Within spacious arrangements that expand Dacus’ signature warm sound with pop-wise confidence, she and co-producer Blake Mills get fully novelistic, fleshing things out with little sonic details that tease the listener and propel the action. Dacus is writing her romance into life, and, as she sings in the album’s title track, she’s “doing whatever to draw it out.”

But back to limerence, and “Limerence.” The psychological term for the worst cases of what poets and teenagers know as unrequited love, it has become a hot topic within wellness circles of late, the subject of TED talks and New York Times articles, an ideal diagnosis for the online dating age. Coined in the late 1970s by the psychologist Dorothy Tennov, limerence has been medically identified as a form of addiction, derailing sufferers’ internal lives at its mildest and resulting in pathologies like stalking at its worst. Now that many romances begin within an app, this time-honored form of amatory torture has new ways to flourish. It takes hold across the garbled lines of long text chains and through the vanishing images of Snapchat, where signals are easily misread. With her calm, generous contralto and a songwriting style that connects Broadway ballads to the arcing song structures of early 2000s pop balladeers like Snow Patrol, Dacus has become revered for creating a soundtrack for these ethereal affairs; the attempt to escape repression, as a queer kid and the daughter of a Christian family and also simply a shy person, is one of her great subjects. Where many of rock’s freedom fighters have embraced confrontation and impulsiveness, Dacus has fashioned herself into a 21st century torch singer, finding the richness in the slow burn that, possibly, will never fully ignite, or might peter out if not well-tended.

Limerence is also a fundamental force within fandom, now extending for many people beyond adolescent fantasies, reinforced within online communities where intense bonds form among fans who often believe they really know the stars who have captured their longing. Forever Is a Feeling acknowledges this aspect of Dacus and Baker’s experience by lovingly but prudently offering glimpses into their developing intimacy — in one song, Dacus and her unnamed paramour lay with legs intertwined in a $700 room at the Ritz, while in “Most Wanted Man,” Dacus counts the bug bites on her lover’s thighs in the Southern heat, a clear snapshot into time the two have spent in and around Baker’s home state of Tennessee.

Throughout Forever Is a Feeling, the presence of boygenius’ worshipful fans can be felt just on the other side of Dacus’ writing process. As that dreamer they adore, she empathizes with them, and tries to figure out how to negotiate some privacy while sharing this love story that means more than the average fount of celebrity gossip — because it is between two women, because it is part of Dacus, Baker and their bandmate Phoebe Bridgers‘ ongoing project of bearing witness to “intimate entanglements among various genders, which can be rare to find in popular music,” as Amanda Petrusich writes in her definitive profile of Dacus in the current New Yorker. Acknowledging that what for her is a precious private life is for others a source of intrigue and celebration, Dacus offers Forever Is a Feeling to the world courageously (I think of other artists who have turned confession into art, from Joni to Beyoncé, still living with those disclosures decades later) but keeps something for herself. The quiet in which she arranges her life into stories permeates the album, an aura of reserve that signals her awareness that life keeps changing even after you’ve put a frame around it. “I meant every word I said when I said it,” she sings in “Bullseye” to an ex. “The world we built meant everything today.” And then she’s on to another world.

“Limerence,” the song, doesn’t appear to be about Baker (I’m guessing, as any lyrics decoder is, unless the songwriter has made clear whom her lyrics portray) — and it’s not exactly about limerence, either. But it does paint a world in which the imaginative life leads to fulfillment, subtly pushing against norms. Dacus is considering how creative work germinates in a space of dreaming much like the one where crushes form. A tinkling piano rhapsody redolent of Rufus Wainwright‘s early songs, “Limerence” describes a lazy afternoon shared by friends; the scene is relaxed (Dacus, for her part, concentrates on eating popcorn), fluid, luxuriously wasted. It’s the opposite of productive, and that’s part of the point. In this particular safe space, Dacus ponders breaking up with a lover who’s not providing room for her own desires to roam: “The stillness, the stillness, might eat me alive.” She hungers for the freedom in solitude and mild recklessness that her friends embody at that moment. “Natalie’s explaining limerence between taking hints from a blunt, high as a kite,” Dacus sings; her friend’s monologue stimulates her itch to find new romantic, and possibly artistic, inspiration.

I love the languid, barely present way the idea of limerence surfaces in this song. It’s just a suggestion, sparking Dacus’ restlessness. Her friend’s mention of infatuation as a subject of inquiry isn’t really developed, but there’s the sense that it takes Dacus somewhere, into a realm of possibility; it gets her thinking, making up a new story that might be a way out of her doldrums. Or maybe it’s just the beginning of a new composition. Here and throughout Forever Is a Feeling, such moments arise. The lover who is drawing out the process of falling is also the artist who shapes stories as a way to better understand who she is and how she moves through the world. In “Most Wanted Man,” she imagines the fulfillment of her new love as an act of solidifying a story: After she spends her life trying to make Baker happy, she sings, she’ll have “time to write the book on you.” This is the act of generosity and care she grants her partner — articulating what’s happening between these two people who haven’t always been able to acknowledge or possibly even comprehend their growing bond. She will write the book that seals their fate, with a pen she’s willing to share.

The queer heart that beats within that book Dacus will write — and then burn, “nothing left for anyone to read or weep” — is a crucial aspect of Forever Is a Feeling. If her previous album, Home Video, dwelled on the coming of age stories of queer kids unable to fully share their truths with the ones they love, this intensely lush, deeply inviting yet still somehow self-protecting set of songs connects Dacus’ adulthood as a proudly out queer woman with the larger story of LGBTQIA+ people continually building and rebuilding a world where they can openly live out their desires and chosen family bonds.

As a sociological phenomenon, Tennov wrote, limerence has long been considered a woman’s realm — the space within literature and the high arts where excessive heroines condemn themselves to a tragic death via their longing. Think Anna Karenina or Madame Butterfly. In a society where queer people must still often negotiate a relationship with the closet — increasingly so right now, as the rights of trans people are on the line and even uttering words like “lesbian” might lead to sanctions — limerence must be viewed not necessarily as a psychological pathology, but possibly as an externally imposed condition. When people are stopped from expressing themselves, their dreams still speak. This is what classic queer anthems like Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” or Holly Near’s “Imagine My Surprise” articulated.

Dacus lives in a different world than those artists did, many of us like to think. But she’s also in the same one. Many gains queer people have made are, as recent events are proving, frighteningly fragile. Forever Is a Feeling fights against that sense of imperilment through its frank articulations of desire (“Ankles” is surely one of the sexiest songs of the new century, and the video for “Best Guess” celebrates masc glamour with gleeful abandon); but at the same time, it acknowledges that on some level, only the strength and insistence of queer people’s imaginations, that will to live and call out loved ones’ names, can be relied on in dangerous times.

There’s a kind of musical-theater quality to many of Forever‘s songs, but Dacus’ voice never projects in the way, say, Ariana Grande’s does in Wicked. When she invokes Glinda the Good Witch as an alter ego, it’s in a song called “Come Out.” Making a beautiful connection between the ultimate imaginative kingdom of Oz and the shining green world she and her friends and fellow freedom fighters have built for themselves, Dacus extracts the theme from the original Glinda’s theme song (“come out, come out, wherever you are”) for a pride anthem centered on the love between herself and the lover whom she now views as a partner, the one she wants to keep holding in her head and her arms for a lifetime. In this delicate ballad, she croons about wanting to scream: “Screaming my favorite things about you, screaming your name, your name, your name.” There it is again — the force of imagination, of writing the book, of living the dream. Don’t call it limerence; don’t call it a phase. Lucy Dacus is in this for life.