CITY LIGHTS

City Lights “Thumbs”

During Lucy Dacus’ last show at 9:30 Club on Dec. 7, 2019, she started the encore with a new song. She’d played it live at other solo tour stops that year, and at shows for her supergroup boygenius. When she came out from backstage, she asked the crowd to be quiet and not to record, then mentioned that she hadn’t yet released the track, but that she was looking into it. Then she launched into “Thumbs,” a haunting ballad with an undercurrent of rage. Dacus says the song is autobiographical: It describes how a loved one gets a call from her absent father, and Dacus takes her to see him because “for whatever reason you can’t tell him no,” she sings. Dacus watches the two at a bar, bile rising as her companion’s nails dig into her knee, and then the song moves into quiet, understated anger: “I would kill him / If you’ll let me,” Dacus sings breezily. “I would kill him / Quick and easy.” “Thumbs” (and its gory central image—thumbs pressing on eyes until they pop) was an instant fan favorite among aficionados of the Richmond-raised artist. They posted about it on Reddit, while over on Twitter an account called @releasethumbs periodically checked in on the song’s release. Today, @releasethumbs gets to report the happy news: “Thumbs” is out in the world for all to hear. Though the song revolves around pain, it’s about love, especially at its conclusion. “I wanna take your face between my hands and say / You two are connected by pure coincidence,” she sings. And in the end: “You don’t owe him shit, even if he said you did.” The song is available on Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, and other streaming services. Free—$1.29. —Emma Sarappo

City Lights

Ken Ludwig’s Dear Jack, Dear Louise: Love Letter Experience

“My brother and I knew that our parents met by letter because their parents wanted to set them up,” explains playwright Ken Ludwig. Their correspondence began during World War II, while Army Capt. Jacob Ludwig was serving as a doctor on bases in Oregon and Texas before finding himself on the front lines in the European theater, and Louise Rabiner was working as an actor, dancer, and singer in touring companies of popular Broadway shows. It took them three years to finally meet during V-E Day celebrations in Times Square. Their playwright son, an avid reader of the personal letters of historical figures (he describes the form as “intimate like something whispered in bed”), wrote Dear Jack, Dear Louise, an epistolary two-hander with letters written from scratch—to replace the lost originals—which premiered at Arena Stage in December 2019. Then COVID-19 closed theaters. But Arena’s artistic director Molly Smith called Ludwig with an idea. Casting director and line producer Teresa Sapien wanted to let audiences experience the play in a new way: via letters. “I was thrilled by the idea, but my role was mostly as a consultant and giving my blessing,” Ludwig says. For the audience at home, nine letters from Jack and Louise will be mailed out over the course of April, reproducing period details of envelopes, stationary, stamps, and cancelation markings researched by Arena’s props department led by properties director Jenn Sheetz. “They’re the experts,” says Ludwig. “The research and details are mind-boggling.” Registration is available at arenastage.org through March 23. $35–$55. —Ian Thal

City Lights

The DC Teacher Art Show: Distance Learning

Plenty of artists have used pain as inspiration for their work—think Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period, for example. And 2020 provided plenty of fodder for pain-based work. But a new show fuses pain with joy by letting teachers reflect on the last year’s hardships and how they stayed connected with the communities and children they serve. Made possible by a DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities grant, the DC Teacher Art Show Distance Learning seeks to share some of their works. Curator Zsudayka Nzinga Terrell gathered pieces from 21 art teachers in the D.C. area that explore isolation and mental health during the pandemic and social unrest of the past year. The online gallery includes portraiture, sculpture, print, digital and abstract art, and spoken word pieces. Some of the artists featured have an established presence, like Reshada PullenJireh, whose painting of three laughing children, “Hey Sis,” headlines the exhibit. “I choose to paint Black people living their everyday lives as an urgent need to tell the stories of our humanity,” she writes on her website. For other teacherartists, this is their first exhibit. The work can be seen in a 3D virtual walkthrough or as a carousel of images that portray everything from somber vigils to childhood joy. The exhibition is available at dcteacherartshow.com through March 16. Free. —Mary Scott Manning

City Lights

Mother Tongue Film Festival

The Smithsonian’s sixth annual Mother Tongue Film Festival—a space for celebrating global cinema with a special emphasis on language—opened on Feb. 21, International Mother Language Day, with Waikiki, Hawaii’s first Native-helmed feature. Directed by Christopher Kahunahana, the film is a surreal portrait of Kea, a teacher, hula dancer, and bar hostess who, after striking a man with her van while escaping from an abusive ex, brings that individual into her life. If you weren’t able to snag one of Waikiki’s 400 first-come, first-serve tickets, don’t fret: The all-online, free festival is rolling out a healthy schedule of screenings—45 of them in 39 languages—through May. Teko Haxy (Being Imperfect), a short experimental documentary directed by Brazilian anthropologist Sophia Pinheiro and Keretxu filmmaker Patrícia Ferreira, is available to view now for free. Be sure to scroll through Mother Tongue’s huge collection of short films, many of which are already available, and remember to register for director and filmmaker talkbacks to round out your festival experience. The films are available to view at mothertongue.si.edu. Free. —Amy Guay

City Lights

In Memorium

Before the pandemic, you could find a lion onstage at spots around town like DC9, the Dew Drop Inn, and Boundary Stone. This was Tuff Lover, an “electronic pop/deep house quintet” from Nikhil Rao, also the frontman for local surf rock band Bottled Up. Rao says the lion got involved when he went to perform at Boundary Stone and found a lion mask in his bag; it joined him onstage from then on. Rao started the project in 2018 as a distraction from his other projects and as a way of experimenting with the lo-fi he had been listening to. It took off among his friends—that’s how Freddy Leighton got into it. When Leighton told Rao how much he liked the music, Rao had him join in on vocals at the start of 2019; Leighton sang in the band until he died in October 2019. Rao reminisces about the way he used to “trick” Leighton into playing live shows. Rao would never hold band practice beforehand; he’d instead throw Leighton into a song live because he liked Leighton’s improvisations. “Lyrics and melodies that came straight from the heart,” he says, “didn’t want to get rid of that.” The only new music on Tuff Lover’s Bandcamp since Leighton’s death is In Memorium, a live recording from February 2020 released one calendar year ago. Rao calls it “time we were all able to get together and celebrate that moment.” The recording is available on Bandcamp. Free—$7. —Michael Loria

City Lights

“Nightwalker”

“Nightwalker,” the new song by Washington D.C.’s Morphine Smile, is about mourning. When he wrote it, singer-songwriter Jim Smalley, who’s previously played with bands like Honest Haloway, was thinking about walking down 14th Street NW, past the shell of what was once Black Cat’s Red Room. Though the beloved D.C. bar still technically lives on in another floor of the same building, the iconic incarnation that existed from 200118 is gone—and COVID’s nixed gatherings for the barflies, often affiliated with the city’s independent music scenes, who called it home. Smalley uses the story of this small but impactful loss to lend the song intimacy. Whether or not you ever set foot in that iteration of the Red Room, the themes of “Nightwalker” are resonant, especially in a city battered by destructive change. It might seem trite to mourn a bar in the midst of so much human suffering, but there is real pain in the loss of a place where you once felt safe and fulfilled. Smalley’s song deals with that pain by doing the hard work of passing through darkness, one step at a time. “Nightwalker” is one of six songs on Morphine Smile’s new EP, Heirloom. The track was mastered by TJ Lipple, who has also worked on music with Priests, Snail Mail, and Bikini Kill. The song’s lyric video is available on YouTube. Free. —Will Lennon