The second song from Historian, the upcoming album from Lucy Dacus is out in the form of a self-directed video. "Addictions" is a song about the many toxic forms addiction takes, from substance abuse to destructive patterns to relationships and the difficulty of breaking free.
A former film student at Virginia Commonwealth University, Lucy Dacus directs this video that opens with the main character discovering a magical picture frame capable of seeing the world in black and white, a world that at the film's end seemed quite happy. I wasn't sure whether the black-and-white world or the colorful world represented reality. But Lucy wrote to tell me that, "the colorful world is reality. The black-and-white world is the past. The song is about being addicted to a person and running back to toxic relationships knowing that they aren't good. The woman searching for me is attempting to return to the past, our shared past. When she enters the black-and-white world, we are both submitting to a fantasy. Our connection isn't real anymore, but we can't help but circle back to revisit it."
It's a little over a month away from the release of Lucy's second album and this song coming just a month after the stellar track "Night Shift," are great indicators of what we're going to hear when Historian is released by Matador on March 2. The album was produced by Collin Pastore who produced her debut album, a top ten album for me in 2016, No Burden. This record was mixed with John Congleton.
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