Hey I'm Brian Hyatt and this is Rolling Stone Music Now.

Today I'm going to play an interview I just did with Lucy Dacus, the singer-songwriter

who just released one of the year's best albums is called Home

Video and it's really her third-grade album in a row. This particular album was largely

based lyrically on what she found in her journals from middle school and

high school and it makes it a uniquely specific, uniquely confessional, uniquely personal album, and both musically and

lyrically it's just excellent. Her first album was called No Burden. They came

on 2016. Her second album was called Historian. Both were checking out. She

also put out a great EP called 2019 in 2019. She was also in an indie supergroup

called Boy Genius with her friends Julian Baker and Phoebe

Bridges who we've had on the podcast last year and in the interview we talked about

the making of home video, the art of songwriting, the future of her career,

Lucy's love for Bruce Springsteen, and really a whole lot more. Let's get

straight into that interview.

So you have a pretty interesting songwriting method. Your songs come together without an instrument.

You have the lyrics and the melody and then you go to your guitar and figure out what the chords are and build the arrangement from there.

What are the sort of advantages and disadvantages of working that way.

I feel like it works for me just because if a song can't function somewhat like a poem

or like if the story isn't there, I don't think that I can save it with music.

I feel like I just like writing songs that function without any instruments. In fact, like thumbs on my record, I wished that I could have just sung it

a cappella, but the arrangement we got to was like as close as we could get to that without it sounding

weird.

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