LOS ANGELES, CA- There are artists whose music I admire more than I necessarily love.
For a long time, Lucy Dacus occupied something close to that space for me. I have always appreciated her songwriting, particularly her penchant for crafting intensely personal lyrics that can make an otherwise ordinary moment feel consequential. But if I am being completely candid, I may have enjoyed her more as one-third of boygenius alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker than I did as a solo artist.
That wasn’t because I didn’t appreciate Dacus’s music. Quite the opposite. I recognized very early on just how gifted a writer she was. But some of the earlier performances I saw tended toward the sparse and subdued, sometimes just Dacus and an acoustic guitar. Her writing could be devastating, but musically, the arrangements occasionally felt a little too tame or down-tempo for my particular tastes. Within boygenius, the differences between Dacus, Bridgers and Baker became part of the appeal. Three distinctly different writers and performers could push and pull against one another, each bringing something the others did not.
So when I learned that Dacus would be performing with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, I was intrigued.
I wasn’t prepared for how dramatically it would change my perception of her music.
On September 13, Dacus returned to the Hollywood Bowl three years after appearing there with boygenius, this time making her solo debut on the stage with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. Conducted by Thomas Wilkins, the performance featured orchestral arrangements by Phoenix Rousiamani, Dacus’s violinist and a member of her band. Rather than simply dressing the existing recordings in strings, Rousiamani went through Dacus’s catalog looking for songs that could be reconsidered through an orchestra. The distinction mattered.
Before Dacus took the stage, however, Cat Power offered an entirely different kind of retrospective.
Celebrating the 20th anniversary of The Greatest, Chan Marshall performed the 2006 album from beginning to end.
The sound mix wasn’t particularly flattering at first. Marshall’s microphone felt somewhat flat during the title track, and people were still casually meandering into the Bowl as the performance began. Looking around during “Living Proof,” the venue appeared perhaps 60 percent full, noticeably less populated than when I had recently been there for St. Vincent.
But as Marshall settled into the album, so did the evening.
“Lived in Bars” drew one of the first noticeable cheers, and its rhythmic shift reminded me how much of The Greatest is defined not simply by Marshall’s voice but by the musical traditions surrounding it. That became even clearer on “Willie.” Marshall’s Southern roots seemed to emerge naturally from the song’s Memphis-influenced groove, with the tone of her voice at moments assuming an almost harmonica-like quality.
“Where Is My Love” was similarly deceptive. Its melodic through line initially sounds simple, but there is considerably more happening underneath it. “The Moon,” meanwhile, initially caught me off guard with the vocal processing. I wasn’t particularly fond of it at first. Yet as Marshall performed largely in darkness, something about the performance began to blossom, and even the effect that had bothered me gradually started to make sense within the atmosphere she was creating.
“After It All” returned to another grinding Memphis blues groove before Marshall eventually arrived at “Love & Communication.” Before closing the album, she expressed her gratitude for returning to the Hollywood Bowl and encouraged the audience to stand up for what they believe in. It made “Love & Communication” feel particularly appropriate as the conclusion.
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Then the evening changed completely.
Before Dacus even appeared, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra established the emotional vocabulary for what was about to happen. The opening string arrangement was lovely but slightly dissonant, tender without being fragile. There was something heartbreaking about it before a word had even been sung.
Then Dacus walked onstage, dressed in sparkling black, and began “Hot & Heavy.”
Strings emerged first. Then horns. And almost immediately, I understood what this performance was going to be.
This wasn’t Lucy Dacus with an orchestra playing behind her. The orchestra was participating in the storytelling.
On “Ankles,” xylophone and harp introduced a sense of playfulness. “Modigliani” demonstrated something even more interesting. Dacus didn’t need to remain tethered to an acoustic guitar, which meant her body could become another storytelling device. A hand gesture, a facial expression or the way she moved during an instrumental passage suddenly carried additional meaning.
The orchestral setting wasn’t competing with the narrative quality of Dacus’s writing. It was magnifying it.
“Limerence” began with a gorgeous harp introduction, and its arrangement exposed a theatrical quality in the composition that I had never fully appreciated before. By the time Dacus reached “Talk,” another thought occurred to me: I’m not certain either of her boygenius bandmates could have inhabited this particular musical setting in quite the same way.
That’s not a judgment about who is the better singer or songwriter. Bridgers, Baker and Dacus each possess very different musical identities. But Dacus’s voice has a heaviness to it. Her natural alto has enough body and weight to stand against an orchestra without becoming overwhelmed by it. Instead of having to sing over the musicians behind her, her voice seemed capable of occupying the same physical space.
“Big Deal” was one of the night’s revelations for me. I had heard the song before. But on this night, I felt the regret in it differently.
And that became the recurring theme of the evening.
The songs hadn’t suddenly become emotional. They had always been emotional. What Rousiamani’s arrangements accomplished was to give those emotions additional dimensions. Dynamics became narrative devices. Harps could suggest vulnerability. Horns could introduce playfulness. Percussion could create tension without demanding attention. Strings could make a lyric that already hurt somehow hurt differently.
Dacus eventually introduced Rousiamani and acknowledged her work arranging the music. The credit was well deserved. Dacus had previously explained that Rousiamani listened through everything she had released and identified songs she believed would be especially interesting with an orchestra, including selections Dacus herself might not have considered.
“For Keeps” led into “Come Out,” whose lush strings, xylophone and little harp flourishes continued to demonstrate just how thoughtfully individual colors had been assigned throughout the orchestra.
“Triple Dog Dare” was even more impressive for what the arrangement didn’t do. Wood blocks and piano supplied subtle percussive movement rather than overwhelming the song. At one point, Dacus simply walked around the microphone stand while keeping a hand clasped around it during an instrumental passage. It was a small movement, but within the scale of the Bowl and the drama of the arrangement, it was remarkably effective.
Then came “Kissing Lessons,” transformed into something almost gleeful by an arrangement that prominently employed the horn section, particularly the trumpets. It was an inspired selection. Dacus has said that she herself wouldn’t necessarily have imagined the comparatively punky song as an orchestral candidate until Rousiamani suggested it.
“Thumbs” brought the evening back somewhere much more intimate.
Dacus stopped and restarted the song, joking, “I had to remember I’m me. Just give me a second.”
It was funny, but the moment that followed didn’t feel trivial. She sat on the stage steps to perform one of her most personal songs. After an evening in which the orchestra had repeatedly expanded her music outward, this was a reminder that everything still originated somewhere profoundly internal.
Then came what Dacus jokingly acknowledged was a fairly dramatic energy shift: it was her father’s birthday.
She dedicated “Pillar of Truth” to him, explaining that she hadn’t performed it in years and joking that she essentially needed to shut down emotionally if she was going to make it through without crying. The song had not appeared in her live set since 2019.
It became one of the evening’s most extraordinary demonstrations of Rousiamani’s arranging.
The gradual build was tremendous. Rather than immediately announcing the orchestra’s presence, the arrangement accumulated emotional weight. The crescendo felt earned because of everything that preceded it. It was precisely the kind of moment that demonstrated how arrangement can fundamentally alter the way a song lands, even when its words and melody remain unchanged.
Dacus had another surprise in “No Thank You, I Love You, Goodbye,” a song originating from the era of her 2016 debut No Burden. The song had finally received an official release just days before the Bowl performance as part of the album’s 10th-anniversary celebration.
Dacus joked that now the old song had an orchestra.
That comment was funny because, by this point, the audience understood exactly what that could mean.
As the performance neared its conclusion, Dacus reflected on the world she had been able to create through her own hands and the hands of hundreds of other people, while acknowledging that she was ready to step away from touring and return to her own life. The Hollywood Bowl performance marked the conclusion of the Forever Is a Feeling tour and, at least for the foreseeable future, her final show.
Before “Night Shift,” she made one final request of the audience: be impolite for her and sing along.
They obliged.
The Bowl erupted during the final chorus, thousands of voices filling the amphitheater in the kind of communal release that only works after a performance has spent the preceding hours earning it.
Dacus eventually returned for an encore wearing a flowing, sheer black cloak and closed with “Historians.”
By then, I found myself thinking about the Lucy Dacus performances I had seen years earlier.
What changed?
Certainly Dacus has changed. She is a more experienced performer now, and the confidence required to command the Hollywood Bowl with an orchestra is worlds removed from standing behind an acoustic guitar in a small venue.
But the more interesting answer is that the songs themselves hadn’t necessarily needed to change.
My perspective did.
What Phoenix Rousiamani and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra revealed that evening was how much possibility had always existed inside Dacus’s compositions. Her lyrical restraint and melodic patience, qualities that had sometimes left me wanting something more musically, turned out to provide enormous space for an imaginative arranger. The orchestra could move into those spaces without suffocating the songs.
Perhaps that is what impressed me most.
There is an understandable temptation whenever a contemporary artist performs with an orchestra to equate size with significance. Add 50 musicians and everything becomes grander. Add strings and everything becomes more emotional.
This performance demonstrated something considerably more sophisticated.
An arrangement can change the meaning of silence. It can alter the weight of a lyric. It can make regret feel heavier and playfulness feel lighter. It can take an emotion that had always been present in a song and illuminate it from an angle the listener had never considered.
I walked into the Hollywood Bowl already convinced that Lucy Dacus was an exceptional lyricist.
I walked out understanding her music differently.
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