Music often casts love as a game of absolutes: Heartbreak is the end of the world, and evil exes are obstacles to be overcome, rather than people to look directly in the eye. Life’s not really like
that, though, and it’s rare that a songwriter truly tries to sift through the gray areas of quotidian romance in search of meaning. On her debut solo album What A Relief, Katie Gavin does just
that: absorbing influences from over the course of her life and filtering them through the generational songwriting ability she’s honed as part of MUNA, What A Relief scrutinizes our
collective need for intimacy and romance without judgment or harshness.

Described, accurately, by Gavin as “Lilith Fair-core,” What A Relief taps into the unguarded self-possession and homespun pop sensibility of singers like Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple and
Ani DiFranco, and uses their tenacity as a north star for Gavin’s own trek towards self-discovery. “This record spans a lot of my life – it’s about having a really deep desire for connection, but
also encountering all the obstacles that stood in my way to be able to achieve that, patterns of isolation or even boredom with the real work of love” she says. “What A Relief explores and
portrays it honestly, without shame.”

Written over the course of seven years, What A Relief comprises a set of songs that Gavin always loved but which “had something in them” that she and her bandmates felt didn’t quite fit
within the universe they were trying to cultivate with MUNA. Many of them were written on acoustic guitar, the way Gavin first learned to write songs, and are rooted in “a style of music
that’s very much in my blood, and natural for me,” as typified by the Canadian Women & Songs CDs that Gavin loves, which compiled music by artists like Tracy Chapman, Tori Amos and
Sarah McLachlan.

Throughout What A Relief, it’s immensely gratifying to hear Gavin work through her feelings about intimacy and love in real time. “As Good As It Gets,” a collaboration with Mitski, reckons
with the idea that healthy, long-term love won’t always be high highs and low lows, the calmness of its refrain – “I think this is as good as it gets” – both comforting and a little cold. “It’s about
being in what I thought was a healthy relationship, and wondering ‘Is this good enough if I don’t feel high from it?’” she says. “There’s a little bit of disappointment there in the actual everyday
experience of having intimacy with somebody.”

Openness of spirit is the overwhelming character of What A Relief, an album that’s refreshing in its willingness to accept people as they come, even as it remains in dogged pursuit
of a life that’s kinder, wiser and more loving. Gavin’s explorations of desire and intimacy feel time-worn and necessary – songs that might teach a generation if not how to live, exactly, then
at least how to look within oneself for guidance about how to move forward.

Home Video: a Foreword

 

There are a thousand truisms about home and childhood, none of them true but all of them honest. It’s natural to want to tidy those earliest memories into a story so palatable and simple that you never have to read again. A home video promises to give your memories back with a certificate of fact— but the footage isn’t the feeling. Who is just out of frame? What does the soft focus obscure? How did the recording itself change the scene?

 

Some scrutinize the past and some never look back and Lucy Dacus, a lifelong writer and close reader, has long been the former sort. “The past doesn’t change,” Dacus said on a video call during that interminable winter of video calls. “Even if a memory is of a time I didn’t feel safe, there’s safety in looking at it, in its stability.”

 

This new gift from Dacus, Home Video, her third album, was built on an interrogation of her coming-of-age years in Richmond, Virginia. Many songs start the way a memoir might—“In the summer of ’07 I was sure I’d go to heaven, but I was hedging my bets at VBS”—and all of them have the compassion, humor, and honesty of the best autobiographical writing. Most importantly and mysteriously, this album displays Dacus’s ability to use the personal as portal into the universal. “I can’t hide behind generalizations or fiction anymore,” Dacus says, though talking about these songs, she admits, makes her ache.

 

While there’s a nostalgic tint to much of Dacus’s work, the obliquely told stories in past songs are depicted here with greater specificity. Triple Dog Dare recounts young, queer love complicated and forbidden by religion. The toxic relationship depicted in Partner in Crime is filled with pining, deceit, and meeting curfew. (“My heart’s on my sleeve/ it’s embarrassing/ the pulpy thing, beating.”) Christine is an elegiac ballad about a close friend vanishing into an inhibiting relationship.

 

As is often the case with Dacus, these songs are a study in contrast. In Hot & Heavy, she sings powerfully about blushing and diffidence, while the song Thumbs contains an elegant fantasy about the brutal murder of a close friend’s no-good father. After performing Thumbs during the nearly nonstop tours for her first two albums, it quickly became a white whale to Dacus fans, who have been counting the days until its release just as we’ve all awaited the end of this endless quarantine.

 

While all that touring made Lucy long to re-root in her hometown, her sudden acclaim filled Richmond with funhouse distortions of herself. People she didn’t know were looking at her like they knew her better than she knew herself. Strangers showed up at her front door. “You used to be so sweet,” she sings on the opening track, “now you're a firecracker on a crowded street.” That truism, both true and false—you can’t go home again—seemed to taunt her at the very time she needed home the most.

 

In August 2019, after too much touring then a month of silence, it was time to go back to Trace Horse Studio in Nashville—Jacob Blizard, Collin Pastore, and Jake Finch, her loyal friends and collaborators were at her side again. Dacus’s boygenius bandmates, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker sang a loving chorus on Please Stay and Going Going Gone while each recorded solo songs during the same session. Dacus’s resulting record—full of arrhythmic heartbeat percussion and backgrounds of water-warped pipe organ— was mixed by Shawn Everett and mastered by Bob Ludwig.

 

Loyal Dacus listeners may notice that the melodies here are lower and more contained, at times feeling as intimate as a whisper. The vulnerability of these songs, so often about the intense places where different sorts of love meet and warp, required this approach. “When you told me ‘bout your first time, a soccer player at the senior high,” she sings in Cartwheel, “I felt my body crumple to the floor. Betrayal like I’d never felt before.” Yet in Partner in Crime, Dacus marries content and form in a strikingly different way, using uncharacteristic Autotune in a song about duplicity and soft coercion.

 

That Home Video arrives at the end of this locked down, fearful era seems as preordained as the messages within. “I don’t necessarily think that I’m supposed to understand the songs just because I made them,” Dacus says into a screen, “I feel like there’s this person who has been in me my whole life and I’m doing my best to represent them.” After more than a year of being homebound, in a time when screens and video calls were sometimes our only form of contact, looking backward was a natural habit for many. If we haven’t learned it already, this album is a gorgeous example of the transformative power of vulnerability. Dacus’s voice, both audible and on the page, has a healer’s power to soothe and ground and reckon.

 

 

—Catherine Lacey, February 2021, Chicago, IL