. She credits their November 2018 tour for broadening her ambitions as a writer and helping to crystallize her resistance to being categorized as a “sad girl,” a label that she finds reductive to the point of disrespect. “We all have been spoken about in similar ways, and to rail against that together felt really good,” she says. “Like, ‘Let’s not just be sad — let’s be funny, let’s be loud, let’s be angry.’ It’s a myriad of emotions.
The songs that she began writing during the solo tours that followed often emerged from deep within Dacus’ unconscious mind. “I can’t really write a song if I’m focusing on it,” she says. “It has to happen in the background. I feel like I’m a dummy, and there’s somebody else doing all the cool stuff — a little writer in my brain that’s doing its thing, and it does its very best to get my body’s attention in order to express it.
Working with her longtime backing band in the same studio where they’d made her previous albums, and still trying to rest her voice for all but two hours of the day, Dacus found herself thinking more like a producer than ever before. She had largely avoided acoustic guitars on, because she didn’t want to be pigeonholed as “a twee singer-songwriter”; now she was more open to that texture, along with the possibilities of piano, an instrument that she associates with her mother.
Dacus’ life now looks very different from the one she had as an adolescent. “Up through middle school, my friend group would wake up super-early and go to Panera and have Bible study before school,” she says. “It was my social realm, spiritual realm, family realm. All my time was taken up by church-related stuff.”