Songfacts®:

• With her third album, Home Video (2021), Lucy Dacus takes a nostalgic look at her adolescence without the benefit of rose-colored glasses, recalling painful memories alongside joyful ones. "Partner In Crime" focuses on bad choices she made when she wanted to grow up too fast. She used to pursue older men and lie about her age so she'd be taken seriously as a mature adult, even though she was just a teenager. The man in the song continues to date her even after he finds out about the age difference, making the pair partners in crime in more ways than one.
  
  "'Partner In Crime' is a bit of a dark double entendre," Dacus recalled in a track-by-track interview with Pitchfork. "At the time, I felt prepared for a relationship like that, because I felt like I was confident and could enter spaces on equal footing with people who were older than me. Then it occurred to me, 'Wait, I'm 17, it's weird that he's dating me.' I thought it was more about me and if I was ready for something, and the answer was yes. But what was he not ready for if he was willing to date a high schooler?"
• There are hints that belie Dacus' claim that she's an adult. She wonders if her older beau notices she doesn't drink the coffee, a rather grown-up drink for a kid, on their coffee date. By verse two, he learns the truth about her age but she absolves him of his responsibility. "It's not your fault, it's mine," she sings. "Let the record show, I walked in on my own." Still, he'd have to be pretty dense to not figure things out on his own, especially when he had to get her home early, dropping her off "around the corner so nobody sees you." In the album's previous track, "Going Going Gone," we learned that Dacus had a strict curfew:
  
  I always had to be home by eight
  My dad would kill me if I was late.
• Using Auto-Tune on the track was a last-minute decision that ended up having a big effect on the song. Dacus had a vocal injury that only permitted her to sing within a short window and even then, she couldn't manage to hit the notes. The pitch-correction software not only fixed up her vocals, but it also added a layer of depth to a story about deception.
  
  She told Pitchfork, "I hadn't done anything like that before, and it ended up influencing the arrangement and fitting with the meaning about disguising yourself to be more attractive."
• On both her previous album, Historian, and Home Video, Dacus is a chronicler of her past, but she admits she's not always a reliable narrator. Looking back on her old journal entries, she realized her teenage self wanted to remember experiences how she wished they would be rather than what they were.
  
  "While I was writing all the songs, I would think of a specific memory and then just go find that one entry," she says, "and it's weird to see how your memory and how your documentation are different," she told NPR in 2021. "It really shows you how memory is just like a fiction that you come up with," she says. "I'd like, write what I wanted to remember and leave out the details that I wouldn't."
• Peaking at #104, Home Video marks the first time Dacus cracked the all-genre Billboard 200. She far surpassed the position with her next album, Forever Is A Feeling, which soared to #16 on the tally.