INTERVIEW: Gracie Abrams releases her debut album 'Good Riddance': "I came out a different person on the other side of it. I have so much more trust in myself, I love what this album has gifted me"
American singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams has been a compelling voice in the music industry since her debut in 2019 with the single ‘Mean It’. Her tales of heartbreak and growing up, sung in her gorgeously warm, gentle and vulnerable but powerful voice cross over genres, with electronica, pop, indie and guitar-pop featuring in her portfolio of music.
After releasing two EPs, 2020’s Minor and 2021’s This Is What It Feels Like, today Abrams releases her debut album Good Riddance. Its 12 tracks are classic Abrams in their sound, with a greater sense of maturity in her songwriting, and deal with relationships, the aftermath of breakups and finding yourself.
Abrams has proven over the past few years she can authentically inhabit any genre, but on Good Riddance the soundscape is downbeat pop in it’s lushest, warmest persona but heavily influenced by indie and folk whilst sitting fully in neither.
The album kicks off with ‘Best’ which sets the theme from the start. A gorgeous pared back pop track, it sees Abrams brutally assess her behaviour after a relationship ends and how she ‘never was the best to you’. ‘Used to lie to your face / 20 times in a day / it was my strange little addiction,’ she sings.
‘Full Machine’ is an album highlight, eclectic in the way it combines disparate sounds - a metronomic beat, a prominent guitar, a fleeting swoop of synth - at different points in the song giving it a slightly off-kilter feel in the best possible way. Abrams’ vocal is mesmerising as it soars through some of the most deliciously melancholic melodies on the album.
With its jittery electronic beat, first single ‘Where Do We Go Now?’ is the most upbeat track on the album, and brilliantly captures the sense of loss and confusion when a relationship has ended even though you may not have wanted it to. ‘Now I'm half of myself here without you / You're the best in my life and I lost you / And we had no control when it fell through…hate how I hurt you,’ she sings.
‘Will You Cry’ has a magnetic, driving guitar line that brings a sense of Latino music to the song while ‘This Is What The Drugs Are For’ is heavily imbued with a country sound.
As the album draws to a close, the final two tracks ‘The Blue’ and ‘Right Now’, both over five minutes long, swell into a truly beautiful, cinematic ending. ‘The Blue’ see Abrams contemplating love again: ‘You came out of the blue like that / Never could have seen you coming / Think you’re everything I wanted’, while the relatively static sound of ‘Right Now’ allows the beautiful poetry of its lyrics to take centre stage. It is an elegiac song that tells of Abrams leaving her home, family and everything to heal and find herself: ‘I feel like myself right now,’ she sings. It is a stunning song and an emotive way to end the album - there is an acceptance of the pain that came before, but hope for the future.
Good Riddance is Abrams at her absolute peak, and if there was ever any doubt from her previous singles and EPs, showcases her as a songwriter who has everything it takes to become one of the greatest. It is an album that quickly wraps around your soul and is something you will want to return to again and again. We recently caught up with Abrams to chat more about the album’s creation.
Hi Gracie! Seriously, your presence in the world makes me genuinely happy. it's so good that you're alive and being the person you are for people around the world! How are things with you?
Oh, thank you so much. Things are solid, it's definitely busy times, but in a way that I feel so grateful for. I'm kind of just soaking up the last couple of weeks at home for a while before being on the road for the year. I feel so, so lucky to be putting this music out and touring, I don't take it for granted for a second, especially after the past few years that we've all has, as cliché as that is at this point. There's such a specific kind of joy and softness that comes with with live music and the vulnerability in those spaces. So to be surrounded by new faces, and familiar ones too again soon I really can't wait.
The timing couldn't be any better. Your debut album Good Riddance is out today, and then you're pretty much going straight on tour with your headline show that's incredible. It'll be like, ‘everyone makes sure you get these songs down pat, because I need you to be singing them right back at me’.
100% I definitely will be relying on the masses to sing with me, for sure.
The whole album to me is so intimate. I listened to it all in one sitting, I wish I was laying down for it but I was kind of standing and moving around. It feels like you're in a confession box, like a really beautiful one with very good acoustics. It almost feels like your very first music that you were uploading, it felt like a diary and this album, it's a diary all over again.
Yeah, it definitely is. A lot contributed to that. It's funny that you say you wish you were laying down for it, I wrote so much of this on the floor. I was with [producer] Aaron Dessner sprawled out, he'd be sitting at the computer with the guitar or at the keys or something and I'm like literally on my stomach writing like I do when I'm alone. Because there’s so much trust in the room when we were making this album. maybe part of what would make you feel a similarity or common through line between the old, old stuff is just the amount of the trust that was cultivated while we had these days together. I was thinking about it recently, making this album was the first time in a long time that I have felt the way writing that I did when I was a kid. It made me feel as fulfilled as I remember feeling when I was little and would use writing as the way to process what felt like all these formative experiences or relationships. I feel like having had physical space outside of LA to make this project, kind of in the middle of nowhere, in such an isolated bubble allowed for this world to be formed that I know Aaron and I are both really proud of and felt so fulfilled by the experience of just exploring what it is for us to work together. I definitely came out a different person on the other side of it, and I owe him so much for that in being like a mentor to me in many ways. I feel because of him I have so much more trust in myself. I definitely love what this album has gifted me already and to be lucky enough to tour it on the other side is also just such a gift.
Absolutely. I feel like with your music, and even more so with this album, it's like the listeners don't need to read about you because it's all in your songs. Quite often we search for artists and we search for the singers because we want to know ‘what does that song mean?’ But we don't need to do that with you, because it's all very much there in the lyrics, ‘I Know It Won’t Work’, that distorted spaceship music box intro, first of all I am loving that, but then you've got ‘down the road, ou won't love me until you resent me”. That's a song that punches you right in the stomach, isn't it?
Yeah, that one hurt to write, for sure.
It's such a beautiful song. Can talk to me about the creation of it, because it's so brutal.
It is pretty brutal. The thing with all of these songs is that Aaron had, as my friend, all of the context, ahead of time. Going into it, it was always this every single second of every day, everything goes. Everything can be said, never once have I filtered a word around him. That allowed for there to be a directness in all of the lyrics, because I wasn't concerned about hiding anything. It allowed for the kind of transparency that I am fearful of sometimes just because even when talking about ‘what does this song mean?’ it's all unfortunately very much right there. It's super explicit, and making the songs, recording them and exploring the production of each one, felt like how do we supplement the story? How do we highlight the vocal in terms of keeping people listening to the narrative. Something that Aaron is such an expert at is really hearing the words of the artists and the writers that he works with and he's such a generous person. A lot of that generosity is reflected in his instincts as a producer too because there's so many opportunities while making a song to throw everything at the wall and show off in these boisterous ways. He's so good at highlighting a lot of the vulnerability and the pain in the writing of the songs that he is a part of, and I have felt that in his work before I knew him, even like pre [Taylor Swift’s albums] Folklore and Evermore days. I've been a fan of [Dessner’s band] The National since I was like 12 years old and I've just always felt so drawn to how delicate his songs feel and how much you can understand the story behind each of them. With ‘I Know It Won't Work’, he's such an effortless producer and he's so fun to work with him and to watch and think things through with and to try things, and this one in particular was pretty energising for us to make it, we just felt ‘hell yeah, this is so fun even though it's brutal.’
As it should be. We tiptoe around the severity of heartbreak and feelings and we decorate them but you definitely haven't done that, the only declaration comes from your beautiful voice. Another huge highlight for me is ‘Fault Line’. I love this song. if English didn't come naturally to me, and I just heard this song on the radio, I’d think it was a beautiful summer romance song. And then you get to that lyric, ‘all of my imaginary friends are scared of you’. It's so beautiful.
Oh, my God, thank you.
I wanted to talk to you about being a political beacon. You're in good company, you've got Cardi B with you, you got Janelle Monae, you got some great people that are also using their artistry and their platform to encourage young people to vote, which is a huge issue. Do you see that as a big problem, not just in the US, but globally that sense of powerlessness when it comes to the younger generation, and this assumption that old white guys that are running the world have never listened to them before, so why do we think they're gonna listen to us now? Why do we even bother?
Just like, show up and vote if you're legally eligible, it's not complicated at all. That takes a certain ounce of curiosity to self educate, try to weed out the misinformation. if you're somebody with any platform of any size, how do you amplify the voices of the experts on any given issue, politically, but also on a human rights level, I think we are required to pay far more attention. We're the younger generation, for sure, but we're also growing up. I feel very much like I've entered adulthood, and I think it can be easy to just assume that shit will be taken care of for us by the old, creepy white dude. It's like, no, we are in charge of our own fate and to be able to participate in democracy while it still exists is crucial. Every artist that I admire uses their platform to draw more attention where our attention is required. What's great, though, is that it is becoming less rare that we see non-politicians speaking on the matter of voting. I'm aware of the general age range of my audience and a lot of them are right in that sweet spot of ‘you will be able to register to vote in a year from now’ or ‘you have been eligible, get on it, get excited about it’. There's so much darkness these days, where I can understand the feeling of hopelessness and this inherent urge to surrender or just turn away, but that's so not it. In my mind, it's how do we turn towards it and look at our generation as this community of citizens that deeply give a shit about each other? How do we want to preserve not only ourselves, but our planet so that we can continue to live? How do we get to a point of living in a more equal and united place? I could ramble about it forever. To have anybody's eyes on you, ever, and to not be amplifying the voices of experts, I think at the very least is what we can we can all do. Also, a platform doesn't mean having a million or a million plus people looking, whether you’re private on Instagram or whatever, it's like, share, share.
Absolutely just inspire people to do more, do more talking and pointing them in the right direction. You have an incredible headline tour coming up, Good Riddance is out, you also have this tiny little thing where you're opening for Taylor Swift.
Nuts! It’s mad. I know. No words, no words there.
So just these couple of little things going on. What else is coming up for you this year?
I'm writing a lot and I'm really desperately excited for for the next thing, which is not right thing to say because we're in the middle of Good Riddance, which I just owe so much to the process of that album and to have the opportunity to tour it as much as I get to this year. Live shows always add on to these really beautiful memories associated with each of the songs and being able to connect with people in real time, face to face is something that I will never take for granted. It's taught me so much about how to be a more empathetic, compassionate person. I'm so inspired by the vulnerability that the people come to the shows bring. It's such a special, unique thing to be in community with people that are as open as they are, and have been with me. So this year, I intended to channel that more throughout everything that I'm lucky enough to do. Right now, I'm just soaking up my last few moments of being home before being gone. But I'm really excited to be gone and I'm very grateful, trying to keep my head down and work super hard right now.
Good Riddance is out now via Interscope Records/Universal Music Australia. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Gracie Abrams you can follow her on Instagram and Twitter.
