Lucy Dacus is at her best in “Kissing Lessons”
The singer songwriter tells a story of innocent sexuality and queerness in childhood, encompassing nostalgia in a short and sweet indie-rock song.
The song is short, not even two minutes, but those two minutes are charming and endearing and encompass a feeling of childhood romance. “Rachel was a year old when I was in the 2nd grade / I thought she might know everything”, Lucy describes recieving kising lessons from an older girl in school, hinting at exploring sexuality while maintaining a sense of nostalgia and childhood innocence. This song brings to mind childhood perspectives of love, like the fake ‘marriages’ would hold in grade 2 down the grass hill in the back of the field. Of course these ‘marriages’ were only ever between a boy and a girl, never a boy and a boy or a girl and a girl, already the constraints, confinements, and pressure of heterosexuality had forced its way into all our young and impressionable minds. “Kissing Lessons” provides a sense of queer childhood exploration and love that I never experienced, I was always hanging with girls with constant speculation I had a crush on every girl I hung with. Lucy Dacus is able to in this song twist that perspective, describing her kissing an older girl in elementary school, perhaps not realising then that her sexuality was likely different than the rest of the grade, but hinting towards it all while no one was speculating anything between the two girls, because of course two girls would not be expected to have a spark.
Lucy had requested this older girl for help to win over a boy, naturally the girl offered her a lesson in kissing after school. Dacus describes her calling her by the name of a crush, but then self-corrects that she called her ‘darling’ or ‘baby’ most of the time. This paints to mind a child defending their sexuality, internally knowing the truth. The two girls practiced kissing, perhaps multiple times all while imagining lives when they ‘would start taking hearts’ and ‘taking names’, future husbands and lives in which they had ‘three sons and a beautiful daughter’ and lived by the water, conforming to heterosexuality and patriarchal pressures.
In the last lines of the song, Lucy admits recounting this childhood relationship as an adult- still wearing a charm from those days on her bracelet, wondering if this girl too still thinks of her as a first kiss, begging the question of whether the kiss was authentic to this other girl like it was to her, despite being between two girls, rather than with a boy, was this kiss real to her?
