The very first thing it’s best to learn about Gracie Abrams, the 23-year-old rising singer-songwriter, is that she’s a Swiftie. “I’m not going to be okay,” says Abrams of becoming a member of Taylor Swift’s extremely anticipated Eras Tour for 30 nights as one in every of her opening acts. “I’m attending each minute of each evening,” she says, grinning ear to ear. “I’m making an attempt to be taught from her in each manner I can, and I’m making an attempt to fucking hear all my favourite songs.”
Earlier than she hits the highway, Abrams has to place out her debut album, Good Riddance. On Friday, she is going to launch a group of deeply private songs that might place hazy bed room pop as a style to be reckoned with. On the day we join, she has simply launched her single “Amelie,” a spellbinding ballad about ephemeral love: “I met a woman as soon as / She sorta ripped me open / She doesn’t even comprehend it / She doesn’t know my title.” Because it goes with lots of her songs, 1000’s of individuals on the web are already crying about it. However Abrams, who’s grateful for the group she has cultivated, is offline for the day. “The web is a humorous and scary place to speak about your emotions,” admits Abrams. “It’s humorous for it to be new for everybody else, as a result of I’ve very a lot let go of what I used to be writing about.” She properly provides that “it’s only a reminder of how shortly you possibly can change once you’re in your 20s.”
Over Zoom, Abrams is in her factor in her bed room at residence in Los Angeles, sporting an outsized crimson Nike sweatshirt, with fairy lights twinkling within the background. Our alternate appears like calling a girlfriend; you would possibly snicker, you would possibly cry, otherwise you simply would possibly do each, and Abrams has a tune for any of those events. A self-proclaimed delicate child “with a really powerful exterior,” she has been in contact along with her feelings for so long as she will keep in mind, beginning to write at a younger age. She recollects that as an alternative of speaking to her dad and mom—her father is filmmaker J.J. Abrams and her mom is Katie McGrath, co-CEO of Dangerous Robotic Productions—or her classmates in school, she would sit alone and journal. “I discovered once I was actually little that my intuition was to put in writing earlier than speaking to different folks about the way in which that I felt,” says Abrams.
Ultimately, that apply developed into songwriting. “I occurred to additionally fall in love with the writing course of,” says Abrams. “It makes me wish to be uncomfortable extra usually. It makes me wish to really feel all the pieces to then be capable of write about all of it.” Abrams jokes that utilizing music as a method to cope is “like this horrible trick I’m taking part in on myself, immortalizing my emotions.”
In 2019, after a short stint at Barnard Faculty in New York, Abrams signed to Interscope Data. The next yr, her first EP, Minor, amassed a following and cemented her as a determine within the sad-girl-pop membership. At present, her tune “I Miss You, I’m Sorry,” off that first EP, remains to be her most streamed tune on Spotify, having been performed greater than 133 million instances and counting. What adopted subsequent was her EP This Is What It Feels Like, which gained the eye of friends like Phoebe Bridgers, Taylor Swift, whom she grew up listening to, and Olivia Rodrigo, whom Abrams accompanied on her Bitter tour final yr.
