On her new album, Forever Is a Feeling, Lucy Dacus is setting the record straight on what love is — and isn't.

The American singer-songwriter has written about friendship, crushes and the end of a relationship (her six-and-a-half minute track Night Shift is her only breakup song), but until now, Dacus had never written about romantic love. In an interview with Q's Tom Power, she says she doesn't always agree with the various ways people talk about love.

"We're told that it's a game you have to play in order to win someone's affection, and that just feels manipulative to me and not nuanced," Dacus says. "And when love falls apart, there usually has to be a villain, and people are not willing to just be hurt and accept … that it doesn't have to be somebody's fault."

While she's still searching for her own answers, Dacus has been asking people for their individual definitions of love because "everyone talks about love as if it's this foregone conclusion."

"My therapist said something really nice, which is that love is the foundation of all things that is easily forgotten," Dacus says. "There's another really short definition by Simone Weil … that love is attention. And so anything that you really pay attention to is getting your love, is getting that reciprocity."

After her own experience of falling in love, Dacus says all of the clichés started to make sense to her — but she finds it somewhat embarrassing to try and put those feelings into her own words.

"I have some writing that I did for this album that looking back at it, I'm like, 'This is so bad,'" she says. "I read it back and I'm like, 'This looks like I could have found it on a stitched pillow somewhere.' But that's also what's so amazing and humbling: the fact that you think that you're the first one to ever think it is kind of magical."

When it comes to the end of relationships, Dacus says she thinks grief and heartbreak have their own value.

"The other side of the coin is gratitude, not to be corny," she tells Power. "And that's part of my problem — talking about love, talking about gratitude, I think people associate these things with corniness. But I'm like, 'No, we have to save these things from being corny. We can't be embarrassed about talking about this because that is exactly what life is about!' Being really grateful, you just notice what you actually have and what it does for you. I think all the losses in my life, they are losses because I loved the thing or the person."