CLUNK Recommends | Lucy Dacus - No Thank You, I Love You, Goodbye

Meg Ivy Brunning

Music journalist and photographer based in Cardiff (for now). Just trying to write about music that moves me in someway. If you do wish to find me though, I’ll usually be tucked away listening to music, talking to an animal on the street like a modern day Snow White or at a gig somewhere!

Lucy Dacus honours the past with unreleased vault track ‘No Thank You, I Love You, Goodbye’.

I think a lot about how we hold space for past versions of ourselves. We flip through old journals, trying to ignore how some pages are more tear stained than others. We wince at our former choices, but somehow commend our mistakes and quietly wish we could pull our younger selves into a hug and tell them that everything is all going to work out in the end.

And while we leave behind posters and journals for artists, that process plays out in real time through the music they leave behind. Ten years on from her debut album ‘No Burden‘, Lucy Dacus is turning around to gently embrace the girl who wrote those songs and, in doing so, she’s giving the rest of us a piece of history we’ve been clutching onto for years.

Alongside the news of a 10th anniversary reissue, Lucy has officially released fan-favourite ‘No Thank You, I Love You, Goodbye.‘ If you’ve spent any time in the quiet corners of the internet tracking down bootleg live clips, or maybe you’ve been one of the lucky ones to experience it first hand … you’ll know that this track was written back during the ‘No Burden‘ days.

Stepping into the studio with her original Richmond team, Adrian Olsen and guitarist Alan Good Parker – Lucy gives the track the official home it always deserved. It has all of that raw and fuzzy warmth that made us fall head over heels for her songwriting in the first place, but there is a new weight to it now. It feels like you are hearing a memory being rewritten – filtered through a decade of growth and understanding.

At its heart the song is a quiet thesis on setting boundaries when affection alone isn’t enough to keep a sinking ship afloat. Try as you might – we’ve all been there. That suffocating space where you love someone deeply, but staying only continues to hurt you both. When Lucy lands on the line: “Whoever told me love is all? Now I know it is not enough,” cuts straight to my core. The title says it all, doesn’t it? The devastating tenderness of a phrase as heartfelt as “I love you”, pressed right up against something as firm and final as “No thank you … goodbye.”

As she closes out her biggest headline tour to date at the Hollywood Bowl this weekend, unearthing this song doesn’t feel like a cash in on nostalgia. It feels like a full-circle celebration of a musician who has always known how to articulate our most unspoken feelings into words.

Listen to ‘No Thank You, I Love You, Goodbye‘ here: