Top 45 Lucy Dacus Quotes

Negativity, in general, is one of the things that holds people back, and you have to see what’s holding you back to get away from it.

I’m going to name my daughter Emily.

My dad plays guitar in the church band, so it’s like music as a service. He plays at old-people homes, so that’s like music as a gift.

I was always writing. I’ve always been attracted to words and stories, communication.

I was adopted, and so was my mom. And so I just was in tune with how life can be intentional. I feel like maybe that helped me to not feel super entitled to a lot of things as a kid.

‘Night Shift’ is the only breakup song I’ve ever written.

There have been a couple specific instances where I’ve felt like I couldn’t survive without interacting with a certain person. I’ve been involved with some pretty manipulative people who have told me the same thought: that I can’t live without them.

Joan Didion’s ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ comes to mind as an example of a piece of media that I really respect and would hope to emulate: just her courage in looking at her husband’s death and the attentiveness that she has in how she looks at it, and the unflinching gaze that she communicates from looking into death.

When you’re a kid, you learn whatever your parents think until you start taking in media. Because all your friends are your age as well, media is the third parent that you ever have. So I think about that a lot, what visual imagery is teaching us, and media in general having a huge impact.

I’ve written in the middle of a conversation or the grocery store or at another band’s concert or in the last moments before falling asleep. It’s pretty unpredictable. I think it’s always flowing, and sometimes I’m not listening. There’s no formula for when I’m going to be able to be a good listener to myself.

Whenever I’m trying to understand people that I don’t understand, or things in people or even in myself, I’ll say, ‘When did this negativity get here?’ I try to think back to how I was raised to deal with things, and then consider how the person that I’m dealing with grew up.

I haven’t studied history – I couldn’t give a discourse in medieval literature – but I am a personal historian, and I do a lot to take in the histories of the people around me.

I hear a lot of artists become kinda self-referential, and a lot of people that tour a lot tend to write about the perils of being on the road later in their careers.

I couldn’t have imagined working on a film I didn’t believe in.

I was always taught to be grateful, and so the question came early: What is there to be grateful for? Why is life supposed to be so good? That’s still a question I try to answer all the time.

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.

From the very beginning, I had a lot of female role models in music. I would go to shows, and there were always women fronting bands and playing guitar or backing up and playing drums or bass in a band. That probably contributed to my belief in myself to go out and perform for people.

What’s cool about Matador is that everyone I’ve met there is just so chill and really into what they’re doing. Everyone that works there, there’s just such a lack of ego, and there’s such a commitment to what they’re doing. They all like each other.

I would not say that my relationships are becoming shallow; if anything, some of them are really being tested in a way that I’m so thankful for my friends that call me and still want to talk.

I can’t imagine being in a tour bus. It would be nice, but I think it costs $30,000 a week to rent. And I can’t imagine spending what many people make in a year on a vehicle for one week.

Film is like sculpture, writing, acting, technical arts, all sorts of arts. And that’s why I wanted to do it for so long, because it would include so many places for attention.

The main way that being adopted has shaped my songwriting is that I was asked at an early age to consider the circumstances that led to my life, and in a way, I was introduced to how fragile and unlikely life is from the beginning.

People actually tell me that I’m living my dream. And I’m like, ‘It’s a little more nuanced than that.’

Being on tour, it’s really easy to stop knowing people that you want to know, because you’re not sharing experiences; you’re not existing in the minor moments of somebody’s life.

I don’t have any weird gimmicks. I do put on lipstick for the show. That’s what separates it. ‘Cause I don’t wear makeup at all… That’s probably the closest thing I have to a routine.

I like to think of hope as a fact and something that wins out always. Whether you’re hopeful or not, actually, you do get through what you’re in the middle of. When you’re in it, you don’t feel like that’s possible. But time and time again, we’re proven wrong.

We were so limited on time for ‘No Burden’ that we didn’t get to overthink anything. There was no going for the perfect take, or even going for three takes. It was kind of nice because what you’re hearing is our first impulse.

Really unfiltered personal writing is cool to me. I’m like, ‘How did you show that to everyone?’

I don’t even drink coffee. I try to avoid becoming reliant on any substance.

If there are people who treat me wrong, I either talk to them about it, or I don’t talk to them anymore. It’s been the most thoughtful and considerate thing I could do for myself and other people. I am going to try to do that forever.

I never considered a career in music because it was too unattainable. I just didn’t believe it was possible.

I don’t end up writing songs in my journals, but I’m sure that my ability to write songs has been helped by how consistently and impulsively I try to get my life into words through the journals.

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.

I’ve been adjusting to what it means to be a songwriter, figuring out what I like about it and what I don’t like about it and what it means to me as opposed to other people.

The phrase ‘no burden’ largely captured what I wish people believed about themselves.

Even if somebody wanted to tell me what one of my songs meant to him or her, I can’t do it – I would be probably put to tears every time.

I think I’ve had extremes of being unable to exist outside of my own head, and then I only am existing for other people… There’s a middle ground where I should take care of myself and other people.

There is no ‘stop’ – there’s always ‘go’ on both sides: always keep writing, always keep recording. I don’t find them to be segmented processes.

It seems like there’s a real world for new ideas in Philly.

A journal is your completely unaltered voice – it’s just for you. And if you know that voice, and you like it, you can bring it out to everyone else, and that’s the most honest and vulnerable thing you can do.

Writing has never been an intentional endeavor to me. I know a lot of people have experiences and then sit down and try to sort them out through song, but whenever I sit down to write, it comes out hackneyed or overly saccharine.

I’m not a big risk-taker – being bad just wasn’t worth my time or the risk of having the consequences for it. So maybe I’m a little bit lame for that.

I think in ‘No Burden’ there was a lot of positivity on the record.

I always wrote songs. Elementary school, middle school. It didn’t feel more creative than speaking. It was just normal to do that.

It’s important for me to write songs that feel good to sing every night and remind me of my core, truest beliefs.