Lucy Dacus and Rufus Wainwright Talk with Amanda Petrusich

On October 26, 2025, the musicians Lucy Dacus and Rufus Wainwright took the stage for a discussion with the New Yorker staff writer Amanda Petrusich at the 26th annual New Yorker Festival, a weekend of conversations, screenings, performances, and more. The Festival, which is the magazine’s signature event, was held in New York City and brought together leading voices in literature, film, comedy, television, politics, and medicine.

Lucy Dacus is a singer-songwriter, a guitarist, and a record producer. She began her musical journey in Richmond, Virginia, and has released four studio albums, including “No Burden,” “Historian,” and “Home Video,” which focussed on the worlds of childhood and adolescence. In addition to her solo work, Dacus joined forces with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker to form the band boygenius. Their album, “The Record,” released in 2023, garnered widespread acclaim and earned the trio three Grammy Awards. Dacus’s most recent solo album, “Forever Is a Feeling,” explores love, desire, and larger-than-life romance. It was released in March and débuted at the top of both the Billboard Rock Album Charts and the Billboard Folk/Americana Album Charts.

Rufus Wainwright is a singer, a songwriter, and a composer, renowned for what the New York Times calls his “genuine originality.” He has released eleven studio albums, including the Grammy-nominated albums “Unfollow the Rules” and “Folkocracy”; three DVDs; and six live albums, including “Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall,” also nominated for a Grammy Award. He has written two operas and numerous songs for films and television shows. His first musical, an adaptation of John Cassavetes’s “Opening Night” created with Ivo van Hove, premièred in 2024. In the same year, his “Dream Requiem” premièred with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. The recording was released by Warner Classics in 2025, and was followed by the U.S. première, in Los Angeles.

Amanda Petrusich is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of three books. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her nonfiction and has also been nominated for a Grammy Award. Her criticism and features have appeared in the New York Times, Oxford American, Spin, Pitchfork, GQ, Esquire, The Atlantic, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her book “Do Not Sell at Any Price” examines obsessive collectors of 78-r.p.m. records. She is the writer-in-residence at New York University’s Gallatin School.