Lucy Dacus Brings "Forever Is a Feeling" to a Mill Courtyard — and the Record Sounds Even Bigger There

Some albums are built for arenas and some for headphones at 2 a.m. Lucy Dacus's "Forever Is a Feeling," released March 28, 2025, on Geffen, is that rarer thing — a record built for a warm night in a courtyard with a few thousand people who know every word. She tests the theory at MASS MoCA in North Adams on July 22–23, and the setting could hardly be better.

For the uninitiated: Dacus is a songwriter of unusual patience, one-third of the supergroup boygenius alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, and the author of some of the most quietly devastating narrative songwriting in indie rock. "Forever Is a Feeling," her fourth solo album, is her most openly romantic — a lush, string-laced turn that Variety called "the most romantic record you might hear," and that topped both the Billboard Rock and Folk/Americana album charts. It trades some of her early spareness for orchestration and glow without losing the forensic eye that made "Home Video" a modern classic.

Why does it belong in this venue? Because MASS MoCA's courtyard has become one of the Northeast's great mid-size rooms precisely for records like this. The former Sprague Electric mill complex — 26 buildings, a contemporary-art museum since 1999 — surrounds the outdoor stage with brick and history, and the acoustics reward dynamics over volume. Dacus's songs live and die on the quiet parts: the held breath before a line lands, the room going silent to hear a whispered confession. A courtyard full of attentive fans under the North Adams sky is the natural habitat for that.

There is a bigger point here about where the Berkshires' indie energy actually lives. Tanglewood gets the headlines and the tour buses, but MASS MoCA has spent two decades building a booking identity that a symphony campus never could — the Dacuses and Big Thiefs of the world, the artists who fill a courtyard with people in their twenties and thirties who then spend the weekend in North Adams restaurants and Airbnbs. The museum is a genuine second pole of the county's music economy, and nights like this are why.

Come for the hits from "Home Video," stay for the way the new material breathes in the open air. If you have only ever heard "Forever Is a Feeling" through earbuds, a mill courtyard in July may be the version you remember.

Sources: Lucy Dacus — MASS MoCA event page; "Forever Is a Feeling" — Wikipedia; MASS MoCA — events calendar