The songs of Lucy Dacus are defined, at least in my mind, by their acute sense of personal nostalgia: the people and scenarios that stick with us in ways that we don’t quite understand at the time, those feelings transmitted into songs that you can see, sung in that unwavering, warm-milk alto of hers. The Virginia-born singer-songwriter seems wise beyond her 26 years, and also firmly self-aware of mining her past, naming her second album Historian, and her forthcoming third album Home Video. A highlight off the latter, “VBS,” sets the scene so casually, down to her rhyme and cadence: “In the summer of ’07/I was sure I’d go to heaven/But I was hedging my bets at VBS/A preacher in a T-shirt told me I could be a leader/Taught me how to build a fire/And to spread the Word.”

Dacus is singing, of course, about Vacation Bible School—and about homemade drugs ingested on bunk beds, loud music to drown out the mind, and the vague shape of who we’d become. As the song unfolds and shifts into the second-person perspective, “VBS” focuses in on a first boyfriend with a troubled home life who writes bad poetry and has “sedentary secrets like peach pits in your gut.” Building the song slowly like she’s wont to do, she punctuates this snapshot with all the right musical touches: the subtle organ whooshes between lines, a smoky little solo between verses that sounds straight out of a Neko Case record, the acoustic bridge that does that thing where a band is referenced in the lyrics—in this case, Slayer—and the music in turn responds, exploding into a brief, intense onslaught of distortion. That last part (my favorite) strikes me as a testament to Dacus’ sense of storytelling, her desire to both place you right in the memory and then quickly zoom out.