‘My brain is always looking for flaws, it ruins every nice moment’
Irish singer-songwriter Robert Grace has told of his constant struggle with mental health and recalled how he turned to drink during lockdown to cope.
The Kilkenny musician, who has amassed nearly one-and-a-half-million online followers and whose hit single Fake Fine has stormed the UK charts, described the torment of never fully being able to enjoy good moments when they come along.
On growing up, he says: “Music is the only thing I felt I could do. Everything else just made me feel sad. So I gave that 100pc and didn’t really do anything else.”
At the start of the year, “my mental health started to go all over the place. If something happened I would be happy — for a minute — and then my brain would go and ruin it on me, and that still happens all the time”.
He added: “I am in such a good place at the moment career-wise and still my brain ruins everything it can on me.” Rather than any obvious pressing problems, he said it is the constant torment of a mind that looks for flaws and threats in everyday situations: “It’s just me dealing with my own head. It’s not necessarily anything that’s external, it’s all internal.”
Grace (28) has attracted a legion of young Irish fans for his honest lyrics and descriptions of his mental torment, particularly during the pandemic. In Fake Fine, he says the first verse is his most personal. He wrote it in bed one night in January last year and finished it two days before the then taoiseach Leo Varadkar announced the country would go into the first lockdown.
Speaking about the lyrics — “Twenty-seven, life is Armageddon, I’ve got clinical depression ’cause my mind’s an imperfectionist, I fall asleep, wait, I don’t wanna wake up, but I never wanna take another pill to make me fake fine” — he says he turned to drink to cope after writing it.
“I had Fake Fine written and sitting there [waiting to be released] and then I had a couple of weeks where I drank every day. Literally every night. I would have Captain Morgan straight into a glass. I felt like I was waiting for that moment every day [that I could drink].”
Things turned around when he discovered his wife was pregnant with their second child. “I said to myself, ‘Well, Robert, you’re going to have to make a decision. Are you going to keep going until everything falls apart? Or are you going to stop and realise there’s not just you here. I have a wife and a son and another child on the way’. It made me realise I had to stop thinking of myself and put others ahead of me, which you should be doing anyway when you have a family.”
On why he drank, he says: “You’re trying to escape from whatever way you’re feeling. Alcohol makes you focus on whatever you’re doing in the ‘here and now’ and, when you’re drunk, you’re not thinking about all the sh** that’s bothering you.
“If you’re watching a movie, that’s all you can think about because you don’t have the mental capacity to be thinking of the other million things going around in your head. It’s just to numb.
“You’re numbing the pain for whatever few hours that it will take it away. That sounds like a great solution to the problem, but it’s not.
“You don’t want to feel sad, but it’s all a part of life. And if you don’t feel sad sometimes, you’re never going to feel all the other good emotions like happiness.”
Grace says he does not want to let others feel he has all the solutions. “It’s hard. I’m still trying to figure it out myself, but I realise it’s OK to feel the way you’re feeling.
“I know people who have definitely turned to drink more in the pandemic. They drink every day, whereas they wouldn’t have before. They’re in their 20s. A little younger than me. It’s definitely affecting people. It’s turning into an ‘every day’ habit. Why not when every day is the same?”
When you’re drunk, you’re not thinking about all the sh** that’s bothering you