the liner notes

For every person of colour who has ever felt excluded from romance, beauty standards and sexual reverence and respect. This one is for you.

May you know you are deserving of fun, laughter, softness, enduring love and freedom.

You are more beautiful for everything you have lived through and everything you have learned.

Pain and indifference is not your birthright. Deep and embodied pleasure, partnership, friendship and feeling are written in your stars.

I needed to rewrite the stories I had been told about my lack of beauty and my lack of worth. So for a while, I boycotted white boys.

I realised that it was a big bad world, and there were actually realms of people who could meet me in my authentic light. It got my mind right.

If you are stuck in spaces and relationships where you are under-appreciated, mistreated, or not seen, this is your sign to seek out more radical love. Do not look for love in the same tired disappointing places. It cannot grow there.

I stand before you today a much grown and much beautiful artist. This song is for all the versions of myself who needed to hear it.

To anyone who has ever loved me with the fullness of their heart, people of all kinds of identities from all kinds of places, I am so grateful.

And to every black girl who ever came up to me after a show with tears in her eyes, or laughing, saying: “that’s the song, that’s it!” thank you.

You kept me going, and made me remember why I share songs outside of my bedroom.

I love us.

yours, lucy dk.

I wrote Bye to My Last White Boy while at my very white uni. I wanted to be loved, but I was being used, discarded, played with and rendered invisible by racism in the places I was growing. It took some time but I finally realised I did not have to make myself available to people who didn’t love me deeply, truly and radically. This song was that moment.