Gracie Abrams wishes she could say that she was born a performer and that, for as long as she can remember, all she wanted to do was sing for people.
Instead, she wrote songs alone in her bedroom, terrified of showing them to anyone.
“I sang as quietly as possible so no one could hear me,” says the 24-year-old singer-songwriter. This feeling persists in his early discography, soft in his instrumentation and whispery in tone. But his second album, “The Secret of Us,” released Friday, shows little restraint.
“This album is louder because I was on tour while making it,” he said.
In addition to headlining shows for her debut album, “Good Riddance,” last year's Grammy nominee for best new artist supported Taylor Swift on the North American leg of her Eras tour, now the highest-grossing concert tour of all time. . In those stadiums of more than 70,000 people, Abrams said, emotions were running high.
“It's like a safe space to feel everything very loudly,” she said. “The joy was contagious and I think that really seeped into this album.”
“The Secret of Us” is a musical banger that establishes the mood swings of a twenty-something woman with energetic guitar strumming and husky background vocals. Written largely by Abrams and her longtime friend Audrey Hobert in their shared Los Angeles apartment, it “embodies all the breathless urgency of pouring out your heart to your closest friend at the end of a whirlwind night,” a press release said.
While his early compositions are strongly autobiographical, Abrams said he sees “The Secret of Us” as a novel: dramatic, narrative and containing a plurality of experiences.
Singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“We totally take the seeds of truth and then lean into the drama of falling in love at 20 and how physical that feeling is,” Abrams said. They wrote “Risk,” the album's first single, in August, and in the days that followed, Hobert said she could barely sleep.
“I've just never felt anything like that before in my life,” he said. “Writing together is unlike any drug that exists on the planet.”
If “Risk” was the crack in the dam, then writing the rest of the songs was like catching falling water: “It all came together in one fluid motion,” Abrams said.
She attributes the project's speed to her comfort with her collaborators, Hobert and Grammy-winning producer Aaron Dessner, whom she considers family.
“There's nothing I wouldn't say to either of them, so it's easy to be completely open when writing,” Abrams said.
“With Taylor [Swift] “Also, when we were writing our song, it was like, again, nothing you wouldn't say,” he added.
Swift collaborated with Abrams on “Us,” the fifth song from “The Secret of Us.” With its cinematic percussion and soaring vocals from both artists, the song is a rightful keeper of the titular lyric: “I wonder if you regret our secret.” Her references to “sonnets” and “Babylon” are also appropriate for Swift, whose own infamous tracks 5 often becomes poetic.
Like “Good Riddance” (and Swift’s “folklore” studio sessions), “The Secret of Us” was recorded at Dessner’s Long Pond Studio in upstate New York. But this latest marks the first time Abrams has taken an active role in the production.
“When we were at home writing a lot of the songs with just an acoustic guitar, I felt like I could hear the entire finished product in my head,” he said. Dessner, who “has no ego in anything,” unsurprisingly supported him, “which is epic, because I know that's not always the case, especially with producers as established as him.”
“At no point did Aaron make me feel like I was intrusive or didn't have enough experience. He just encouraged me from the moment I walked in,” Hobert echoed.
During visits to Long Pond, Hobert and Abrams crashed each other's solo recording sessions and downed shots of tequila between takes while Dessner laughed and filmed the duo's funniest moments. When he went to bed early, they stayed up dancing to the demonstrations.
“This is a different kind of liberation,” Abrams said, “because I get to celebrate with my best friend every moment of the way.”
The two shared the stage Monday for a last-minute invite-only show at the Echo, “Gracie and Audrey.” The event attracted about 300 fans, many of whom sported Abrams uniforms. Commercial brand hair headbands
On the setlist were several tracks from the new album, including “Blowing Smoke,” whose scathing line, “If she's got a pulse, she meets your standards now,” drew a handful of gasps. But the jewel of the night was the closer that took seven years to develop.
Abrams first posted a 30-second snippet of “Close to You” on Instagram in 2017. The synth-pop track, which some which has been compared to Lorde's “Melodrama,” released the same year, quickly became a fan favorite. Since then, Abrams has periodically received requests for a complete version.
“I didn't want to publish it for seven years, so I didn't publish it for seven years,” he joked, with a smile on his face. “However, they were right.”
Gracie Abrams.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“Near you” received more than 3 million streams on its first day on Spotify, becoming their best-performing single upon release. It is also her first solo song to debut on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
It's strange to see his fans rally so strongly over a song he wrote when he was 16, he said, “but I love them for caring.”
Obviously, that love is reciprocated. When pre-sales went live for Abrams' The Secret of Us tour earlier this month, his 9/11 show at the Greek Theater sold out within an hour, so he added a second night and then a third.
“I knew we had Night 2 in our back pocket, but not Night 3,” Abrams said. He was surprised when he saw the Ticketmaster queue, which was almost four times the capacity of the amphitheater.
They could have improved the place, “but I don't want to skip steps like that,” he said. Plus, for an artist who grew up in Los Angeles, there's nothing more magical than Greek.
However, he would play anywhere, as long as his fans were there to sing for him.
“As long as they have me, I'll do this.”
