B-Side Guys

The cicadas in the backyard could be maracas in a Spanish town. The washing machine hum could be an airplane engine. Lacy Green’s “The Dreaming Kind” is built on this kind of lateral thinking, the small cognitive slippage that happens when someone is present in a life they’re not entirely sure they chose.

Green grew up in the foothills of North Carolina, in a town she describes as known mostly for its myth, and that sense of place where the ordinary and the unsettled coexist runs straight through her songwriting. The protagonist of this song is at home in the middle of the day, waiting on water to boil, painting her nails, and the domestic precision of that image is exactly what makes it devastating. Green doesn’t need to editorialize. The scene does the work.

The bridge is where the song earns its keep. “Take the trash out / take a look around / how many people, how many houses / if you feel lost, do you try to get found / or just make peace with it” is a question that most folk songs would answer. Green leaves it hanging, which is the right call. The paper swan folded from a pros and cons list, the mama’s warning that chasing two rabbits catches neither one: this is a song populated by inherited wisdom that the protagonist is quietly, persistently refusing.

“The Dreaming Kind” is the first single from Green’s debut full-length, eight years in the making. It doesn’t sound impatient. It sounds like someone who has learned, perhaps against her better judgment, to stay in the room a little longer.