Songfacts®:

• Lucy Dacus wanted her fourth studio album, Forever Is A Feeling (2025), to be all about love - even when it doesn't work out. On "Bullseye," she's joined by "Take Me to Church" singer Hozier for a duet about an amicable breakup, where both parties cherish the time they had together but realize they need to stay apart. They sing:
  
  The world that we built meant the world to me
  When one world ends, the other worlds keep spinnin'.
  
  "To me, it reads as the ideal breakup, where you can remember all the reasons that you got together, and it's not like they don't apply - you still love the person, you still see why they're so special - but it's just not right anymore," Dacus elaborated in a 2025 interview with People. "It's kind of parallel to a mystery of why we fall in love with who we fall in love with. It's a mystery why we fall out of love too sometimes. So, with all the goodwill in your heart, sometimes you still have to walk away. And so, it had to be a duet. It's both people recognizing that and sorrowfully, but contentedly, walking away from each other."
• In the second verse, Dacus recalls how the couple participated in a romantic tradition where lovers latch padlocks on the rails of a European bridge and throw the keys into the river below. But eventually the metal weighs down the bearings and the bolts have to be cut, inadvertently foreshadowing the fracture in the relationship. "If our spell wore off, maybe it's all their fault," she muses.
  
  Two famous European bridges with love locks are the Pont des Arts bridge in Paris, France, and the Ponte dell'Accademia in Venice, Italy.
• Dacus and Hozier first met when he sang with her band boygenius at a show in Boston. They kept in touch through text, but Dacus was nervous about asking him to perform on the track. She told People, "I've had friends contribute, but never in the title, 'featuring' somebody else, and someone else whose career I admire so much. But from all the few interactions I had with him, I was like, 'This guy is a real one. I think he might be into the song. That might be enough.' And it was true. He heard the song, and he was like, 'I would absolutely love to do this.'"
• Love isn't an uncommon theme in music, but it's one that's desperately needed in this day and age, according to Dacus, who sang about her relationship with boygenius bandmate Julien Baker on the album's previous track, "Best Guess."
  
  "I think that love is in a cultural crisis right now. I think that a lot of the ways we talk about love, like dating shows or dating apps or like just humor, comedy in general, is very reductive and is about people's identities and not as much their character and their personality," she told Junkee in 2025. "Even writing these songs, it's nice for me to finally be writing love songs about a woman and be honest about that. But it's not like gay love, it's just love. And so I hope that it has, maybe, encouraged people to invite more nuance and openness into their idea of love and just open the door more."
• Dacus' previous albums were co-produced by her longtime friends Jacob Blizard, Collin Pastore, and Jake Finch. While Pastore and Finch were on board for Forever Is A Feeling, the production staff expanded to include several others, including Blake Mills, who co-produced "Bullseye" with Dacus. The singer told People she felt like she needed someone with a different perspective, and that's exactly what she got with Mills, who's also worked with Fiona Apple and Lana Del Rey.
  
  "We didn't see eye to eye all the time, but that was part of what was cool about it - his approach is so different than mine, and his focus is so sonic, whereas mine is so lyrical. His contributions are really beautiful, so he ended up committing maybe about a third of the record," she said.