Lucy Dacus and Adia Victoria’s Musical Documentation of Religious Trauma

What is it about God that pushes us away from ourselves? How does art heal these wounds? The answer is subjective and ambiguous, but Lucy Dacus and Adia Victoria have found it through songwriting. “Home Video,” Dacus’ 2021 release, and “A Southern Gothic,” Adia Victoria’s 2021 release, are works of art that reclaim the self by questioning God. Both artists dug into their past by using old journals, exploring themes of community, relationships, and adolescence in order to birth these albums. These two works are masterpieces of research and reflection; both artists reflect on their childhood identities while creating musical and melodic excellence in the process. 

Growing up in a Christian family, 27-year-old singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus was entrenched in a deeply controlling religious community. She felt her past, present, and future under constant scrutiny; her peers were always watchful of sin. Journaling was Dacus’ act of defiance against this suffocation, helping her reclaim her independence. In the podcast Call & Response, Lucy Dacus calls this process a “radical act of self-ownership.” When the singer sat down to write “Home Video,” the importance of this took center stage, and her religious trauma became the ink she wrote with. Dacus read through her old journals, starting in kindergarten, and transcribed them. When Dacus was gifted her first journal in kindergarten, a sign on it denoted the concept of a “journal” as a space for her own thoughts. The journal yielded lyrics and melodies that have since been incorporated into one of the best modern indie albums. This is reflected in songs like “Christine” (“We’re coming home / from a sermon saying how pent up evil we are”) and “Triple Dog Dare” (“Your mama read my palm / Shе wouldn't tell me what it was she saw / But after that, you weren't allowed to spend the night”). However, “VBS” is Dacus’ religious childhood reincarnated into a song. 

The song is about Dacus’ summer at Vacation Bible School and her experience with her ex-boyfriend’s depression during this time. Repressed emotions in relation to God ooze through this song, creating a strong sense of dissatisfaction, intertwined with self-hatred, in Dacus’ words. The lyric, “In the evening everybody went to worship and weep,” conveys “worship” and “weep” as synonymous actions, signifying the complex trauma of religion. Dacus has since discussed the horror of this moment, sitting in a church surrounded by sobbing children, as preachers watched on in encouragement. Translating religious trauma into music, Dacus has grappled with her past and publicized the voice she found through journaling as a child. In this way, “Home Video” is in and of itself a home video: an intricate and intimate depiction of Dacus’ adolescence. Dacus shows us how music is the outlet through which religious trauma can unravel –– and one’s identity can be understood.

Adia Victoria, a 36-year-old gothic-blues songwriter, and creator of the podcast Call & Response, also actively journaled throughout her youth. Victoria grew up as a Seventh-day Adventist in South Carolina and had a similar experience to Dacus. She was overwhelmed by a scrutinizing society, one in which the importance of the afterlife took priority over the self. At 16, Victoria dropped out of school, disavowed her parent’s religion, and left the South to begin moving around the globe. Journaling was the only way for her to talk to herself throughout this process, and when she started writing “A Southern Gothic,” she turned to her journals for inspiration. In the same podcast episode with Dacus, Victoria said that diving into her childhood journals “made [her] ask questions about belonging … about private memory versus public memory and the way our memories are shaped by the culture we live in.” The result was an album about the songwriter reclaiming her Southern roots. Her album follows different characters from the South, telling stories that convey religious themes coupled with trauma. “Whole World Knows,” the fifth track on “A Southern Gothic,” depicts a preacher’s daughter, a girl addicted to heroin, wrestling with death as her community looks on in falsified surprise and prayer. In this, we see the difference between Dacus' and Victoria’s respective pasts. While Dacus constantly edited her journals as if God could hear them, Victoria’s first time admitting disbelief in God was in her journal. Thus, Dacus’ album is solely the story of her adolescence, while Victoria’s grounded voice allowed her to depict ranging stories of fictional characters. Since her journal was always her own, “A Southern Gothic” conveyed an awareness of a corrupt community and was not only a singular therapeutic exploration. 

Victoria brilliantly utilizes Southern country musical tropes to display her reclamation, saturating her album about Southern corruption with the sounds of the South itself and creating a poetic, haunting record. The album begins and ends with the same story of a Northern girl who suffers from homesickness for the South but struggles with the trauma it caused. This is Victoria’s story, through and through. Although the album explores many stories within a community, book-ending it with Victoria’s personal experience helps her reclaim her past by retelling it in the present. In this way, “A Southern Gothic” and “Home Video” both highlight how religious trauma can be translated into melodic wonder. Both works are portals into the artists’ lives, honest portraits of the beauty that can be crafted from pain.