Lucy Dacus has been releasing new music with holiday themes, and her latest touches on Independence Day – not so much the movie more the soul of her country. Over a slow beat and peals of pedal steel she intones “America, the tried and true / Red and white and black and blue / Tell me, who did this to you? / If it was me, I hardly knew.” The song is a response, Lucy Dacus says, to the “daily dissonance one endures as an American wherein much of our joy is counterweighted by shame, where much of our pride lives in tandem with injustice and suffering. ‘Forever Half Mast’ is about confronting this unavoidable culpability as an American citizen and consumer. Instead of allowing this guilt to paralyze us, we should try to let it influence us in positive ways”.
Lucy Dacus “Forever Half Mast” – Listen
