Quietly Larger Than Life
Gracie Abrams finds her voice with ‘Good Riddance’
Gracie Abrams’ full-length debut album, “Good Riddance,” fell mostly on the softer side of things, tending more toward ballads than bangers. But that doesn’t bear much correlation to how loudly certain key lines were sung back at her by fans at concerts in 2023, whether Abrams was spending weeks opening for Taylor Swift on the Eras tour or doing her own headlining outings.
“‘Full Machine’ is one that I am happy that my audience has liked, because I really loved writing that song,” says Abrams. “The bridge gets screamed absurdly loud, and that’s always really fun for me — this back and forth screaming match that I get to have with my audience, and that rocks, even though it’s a quite intimate song. And they put real emphasis on certain lines in ‘I Know It Won’t Work’: ‘I’m your ghost right now / Your house is haunted.’ I have to assume it’s rough for them the next day, with some vocal cord damage — you don’t assume it’s gonna be death-metal screams, listening to ‘Good Riddance.’ But, oh my God, I take part in screaming at the quietest moments of Taylor’s songs, so I’m an active participant in that capacity.”
For Abrams, 24, finding just how quiet she could be, while emerging with a slightly largerthan-life star quality, was a process. She nailed it with “Riddance,” produced by Aaron Dessner (a founding member of the National who co-wrote and co-produced much of Swift’s “Folklore” and “Evermore” albums), which led her to a Grammy nomination for best new artist. She’d released two EPS involving multiple producers, but when Dessner came on to do a few tracks for the second of those, it was clear that they’d hit on something that would have him working on her entire fulllength, bringing the L.A. native to his famous Long Pond studio in rural New York, a sedate setting where a whisper really does speak volumes.
The album “felt deeply representative of my brain, I think, versus a lot of the music that I’d made before ‘Good Riddance’,” Abrams says. “I personally was struggling a bit, trying to find my voice and my perspective as a writer. And something that absolutely changed my life, not just in terms of the music that I have made, but the kind of person I am, is when I met Aaron.” If their initial output was introspective and hardly micro-targeted at Top 40 radio, “I don’t feel like my label (Interscope) has been in my grill at all about any of that. They want to invest in the artists that they believe in and in letting us, at least in my case, take time to search for what feels like the right thing. In the process of making this album, I was able to get to know myself better. And what I am excited about now with the next collection is how there is a throughline with ‘Good Riddance,’ yet it feels so different.”
Yes, full album number two, being produced at Long Pond as we speak, is “scary close” to the finish line. Although she hesitates to characterize a musical style, Abrams says the Eras tour was “the best experience of my life” — and “to have that become a part of my weekly routine for four months straight has bled into kind of all ways of my life, not just how joyful I feel internally, but the songs that we’ve been making.” Said tunes are still personal, but more playful, she promises, and “one million percent deeply influenced by seeing what the effect is” on a wildly receptive audience.
“Writing ‘Good Riddance,’ there was a lot of working through feelings in real time, in a way where there were lots of questions being asked,” Abrams says. “This music feels like bolder statements, in real time. Everything feels differently charged, and it makes me incredibly excited about the live (show), because I think I’ll be able to have more fun on stage with this new energy.” Note to anyone attending the last six weeks of the Eras tour late next year, which will have Abrams opening all dates, presumably with a much updated setlist: Start girding those vocal cords now.