Lucy Dacus / Kissing Lessons - Single / 2022
Kissing Lessons
wistful, tender, quietly wry
A short, deceptively simple reminiscence about a childhood friend who taught the narrator how to kiss, ostensibly to practice for future boyfriends. Told with a plainspoken, almost diary-like tone, the song lets the retrospective adult voice quietly notice what the childhood self couldn't: that the rehearsal itself may have been the real romance.
queer awakening in retrospect childhood ritual and play compulsory heterosexuality nostalgia and lost friendship naming and identity
Who's speaking
An adult narrator looking back on a pre-adolescent friendship, speaking mostly to herself or an implied listener rather than to Rachel directly; the voice is intimate and unguarded, though its reliability is complicated by the gap between childhood understanding and adult hindsight.
What happens
The song opens with the narrator as a young girl seeking guidance from an older girl, Rachel, who offers to teach her how to kiss so she can win a boy's affection. What follows is a practice session framed as preparation for heterosexual romance, but described with a charged, playful intimacy — the two take turns pretending to be swept off their feet. The middle verse imagines separate domestic futures, each girl picturing a conventional family life with a husband and children, a detail that reads as both innocent and quietly ironic. The song ends with Rachel's family moving away, the friendship fading, and the narrator left with a small physical memento and an open question about whether Rachel remembers the kiss the way she does.
How it's built
Three narrative verses followed by a short coda-like closing verse, moving chronologically from childhood instruction through imagined futures to the friendship's unresolved end. There's no traditional chorus — the song functions more like a spoken-word memory piece set to melody, with the lack of a repeated hook reinforcing its diary quality. The absence of a clear emotional climax mirrors how the narrator herself never got closure on the relationship.
Section by section
Opening verse
The narrator establishes Rachel's authority through age and apparent worldliness, treating her instruction as near-sacred. The specificity of lip gloss and hair tossing grounds the scene in the material rituals of girlhood femininity being passed down.
Second verse
“We'd take turns being seduced”
The exchange of roles during the practice kiss — each girl playing both pursuer and pursued — subtly undercuts the stated heterosexual purpose of the exercise. The naming confusion between crushes suggests the boys were almost incidental, place-holders for an intimacy that existed independently of them.
Third verse
The parallel visions of future domestic life, while framed as compatible girlhood dreams, read almost as a rehearsal for compulsory heterosexuality itself — each girl picturing a nearly identical, socially prescribed adult life despite their differing fantasies of setting.
Closing verse
“wonder if she thinks of me”
The ending refuses resolution. The narrator's lingering curiosity about how Rachel remembers their shared past reframes the entire song as less about childhood preparation for boys and more about the quiet, unresolved significance of this specific girl.
Craft
- dramatic irony
- The narrator reports the childhood belief that the kissing lessons were purely functional training for future boyfriends, while the song's retrospective framing lets the listener sense an unspoken romantic charge the child couldn't name.
- symbolic object
- The bracelet charm bearing Rachel's initial becomes a stand-in for memory itself — a small, durable artifact that outlasts the friendship and carries unresolved feeling.
- parallel imagined futures
- Each girl's imagined adult life, one with a house, one with a view of water, both including a husband and children, mirrors how both were performing a heterosexual script neither actually chose.
- understatement
- The matter-of-fact tone throughout, especially around the ambiguous ending, keeps the emotional stakes submerged rather than stated outright, letting absence and vagueness do the emotional work.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a song about queer memory told through the vocabulary available to a child — the narrator didn't have language at the time for what she now recognizes as significant, so the 'lessons' doubled as a first real romantic experience disguised as practice. An alternative, more conservative reading takes the song at face value as simply a nostalgic account of childhood friendship and play, with the ambiguity at the end read as ordinary wistfulness about lost friends rather than coded queerness. The song's restraint makes both readings viable without forcing either.
Context
Dacus has been open in interviews and other songs about queer identity and about examining memory with emotional precision; this single, released outside a full album, fits a broader pattern in her catalog of plainspoken, specific storytelling about girlhood and desire. I don't have confirmed biographical detail tying this directly to a real person or event, so I'm treating it as a crafted narrative rather than strict autobiography.
Listen for
- the shift in tone between the practical description of the lessons and the lingering, more charged final question
- the way domestic imagery in the third verse quietly mirrors between the two girls
- the plainness of the melody and delivery, which lets small lyrical details carry the emotional weight
- the absence of a traditional chorus, reinforcing the song's diary-like, non-performative feel
About Lucy Dacus
Lucy Elizabeth Dacus is an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and record producer. Originally from Richmond, Virginia, Dacus first gained fame following the release of her debut album, No Burden (2016), which led to a deal with Matador Records.
b. 1995 / United States
Full biography and catalogue