This spring, Dacus, who is twenty-nine, will release “Forever Is a Feeling,” her fourth solo record. It’s a gorgeous and tender album about falling in love—Dacus is now in a committed relationship with Baker—and how the tumult of that experience has forced her to reckon with the unknown. “This is bliss
This is Hell / Forever is a feeling / and I know it well,” Dacus sings on the title track. Her voice sounds pure and soft over a tangle of synthesizers, gamelan, harp, and drum machine.
Dacus described the album as being partly about the idea of “coming to terms with change—of knowing that things aren’t forever,” and of finding freedom in the various ways we are asked, relentlessly and repeatedly, to reimagine ourselves and our lives
Dacus and I met near the museum’s front entrance. The sky was gray and sagging; the Hudson was chunky with ice. When I arrived, Dacus was reading a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,” from 1962, a novel that takes the form of a nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-line poem, written by a fictional author named John Shade, with commentary by Charles Kinbote, a deranged and largely unbearable academic.
(Kinbote could probably be thought of as a punisher, to borrow the title of Bridgers’s second record—a person who simply does not know when to zip it.)
Dacus was into it. “He knows how to write insufferable people,” she said. Dacus is frequently described as statuesque—she is five feet ten inches, with icy blue-green eyes, and she exudes a kind of quiet, serene elegance that feels of another century. The cover of “Forever Is a Feeling” features an oil painting of her, done by the artist Will St. John, who is known for his portraits of drag queens and antique porcelain dolls. Dacus is pictured mostly nude, draped in gold cloth and glowing. Toward the bottom, there’s a strange and tiny figure in a dark cloak, walking. “That was left over from some other painting,” Dacus said. “I think he was planning to get rid of it. But I like him. He reminds me of the Fool in the tarot deck. He’s just starting out on a journey