Abby Waisler
Somewhere on Gracie Abrams’s camera roll is a video of Taylor Swift in the pop superstar’s Tribeca kitchen, deliriously putting out a bonfire threatening to consume her center island.
Behind the lens, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter cries as her childhood hero fearlessly works to save them from danger. They had both distantly heard the candle fall earlier in the night, but Swift had assured Abrams that it was probably one of her cats that was struggling. It’s well after 6 a.m., after a night of dinner and drinks – laden with that second thing – when the fire finally goes out.
“She was such a legend – I don’t know how, in that hour or in our state, she knew what to do,” Abrams gushes. Billboard six months later on Zoom. “We both had crazy coughs from the fumes from the fire extinguishers for weeks. »
The duo had just finished co-writing “Us,” the gem from the California native’s 13-track sophomore studio album. Our secret – was due out this Friday (June 21) – when the fiasco happened. Before that, they spent the night previewing songs from Abrams’ new album and those from the 34-year-old hitmaker. The Department of Tortured Poets for each other before either project had even been announced. Abrams remembers singing and dancing “like theater kids” to “But Daddy I Love Him” and lying on the floor in disbelief after hearing “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”, after which they began to listen to instruments created by their collaborator and mutual friend. Aaron Dessner.
“Something caught our attention both very loudly and very quickly,” says Abrams. “So we ran to the piano and started writing this song…I used to fantasize about this stuff when I was a kid.”
“We” ended up being the ribbon that tied together the material Abrams had dreamed up with Dessner at his famous Long Pond studios last year, after spending the summer as the opening act on Swift’s Eras tour, a role which it will resume on certain dates in the North. America later this fall. Shortly after their near-death experience, the two women traveled upstate to record the duet with the 48-year-old National founder, who recalls, “It was really a lot of fun to seeing Gracie and Taylor’s chemistry bounce off each other, Gracie. I am in total awe and awe watching how Taylor records and produces her vocal performances and builds the world.
“Taylor is brilliant at synthesizing a whole story,” Dessner continues over Zoom, the wood panels of Long Pond’s interior providing his backdrop. “(This song) brought out everything (about Gracie’s album) in a beautiful way.”
Even without Swift’s name in the credits, Our secret is by far Abrams’ most mainstream project to date. While still full of acoustic guitars and Dessner’s signature woodsiness, the project is sharper, catchier and more extroverted than ever, with light synths and the occasional ghost of a dance beat injecting fresh adrenaline in his DNA. The sound is best exemplified by Abrams’ most recent single, “Close to You,” released earlier this month and already shaping up to be his biggest breakout hit to date.
Abrams hadn’t decided to write a new album so quickly after his first album Good riddance dropped in February 2023, peaking at No. 52 on the Billboard 200 – and even less one that seems so distinctly different from his past work. But the songs continued to come to her as intuitively as they did on that spontaneous night in New York, many of them about unrequited love so strong it “felt like a disease,” she said.
“I didn’t even think we were making (an album), and neither did Gracie,” Dessner says. “The first song we wrote was “Gave You I Gave You I”. This immediately created a very different palette and soundworld, and it evolved from there.
“We just had a good time realizing that we could create totally different things,” adds Abrams. “It was permission, this album, to try whatever we want.”
This time around, the duo – who first teamed up on Abrams’ 2021 EP This is what it feels like – also had a co-author in the person of the singer’s best friend since the age of 10, Audrey Hobert. Abrams and Hobert have technically worked together since they were in middle school, writing and directing Video Star films together, but the leads on Secret of us co-written with Hobert marks his first foray into songwriting.
The friend duo’s closeness allowed Abrams to be more vulnerable than she ever could have been with any other collaborator, and Hobert even plays the role of the title character in the bittersweet lyrics from “Good Luck Charlie”, which the former says are about observing a relationship. ending between two friends and “having a lot of love for both people…half mourning it and half wishing well to everyone involved.” (The title, she clarifies, has no relation to the Disney Channel show of the same name – “I wasn’t a Disney kid growing up… I feel like I missed out on something .”)
“I trust her with my life and she knows me so well,” Abrams says of her friend. “There was no pretending.”
Plus, after hitting the road with Swift, Abrams realized she was ready to perform music that demanded a little more of a presence in the stadiums she was warming up, something she hopes to translate into her own headlining tour to headline theater-sized venues across the United States. on September 5 in Portland. That’s why you’ll hear it properly belted for the first time in several places in The Secret of Us, as shown in the lead single “Risk”, released on May 1st.
“I think it’s just time,” she says of honing her vocal abilities. “I wasn’t a singer. I was a writer and no one else sang my songs when I was little. I sang my songs by myself in my room, so it didn’t require a lot of projection. I could stay very quiet and curl up into a ball. Being on stage is a different game.
But as his star rose with the exposure and residue of Eras Good riddance hype — and while naysayers finally stopped criticizing her “baby nepo” status, being the daughter of director JJ Abrams — her singing skills have drawn some criticism, even though her crackling viola is what many fans love most at home.
“There are singers who are worth mentioning (for their skills), and it’s not me,” Abrams admits. “I love singing so much, because I love singing the things that I write. It’s an extension of writing for me, so I’m always trying to improve this skill. But I wouldn’t start with “I’m a singer.” I would say, “I’m a writer. »
Abrams and Dessner are already working on the former’s next project: “We don’t know what it is yet,” she says, “but we’ve made a bunch of new music that already sounds very different from this album.” » Yet she feels the style and subject matter of Secret of us is fully evocative of his current state of mind, as opposed to past works which gave the impression of “revisiting old wounds” to play them live.
“It can look like this weird ghost,” adds Abrams. “And with Our secret, it still seems very relevant. It’s so me.”
If there’s an exception, it’s “Close to You,” which Abrams first recorded seven years ago with producer Sam de Jong before abandoning it, not feeling ready to embrace such a pop sound. That hasn’t stopped fans from obsessing over a one-second snippet of the track that Abrams posted online last decade, and she’s been receiving almost daily requests — as well as gentle prodding from from his team at Interscope – to publish it.
With Secret of us being as pop as it is, “Close to You” finally has a meaningful home. It appears at the very end of the tracklist and serves as the second single, with Abrams officially dropping it to the joy of fans on June 7. (For those wondering if another year-old dropout, the deeply Swiftian “In Between,” will get the same second-life treatment, Abrams teases that it “feels like a luxury situation.”)
His label’s patience was rewarded, with the track debuting at No. 49 on the Billboard Hot 100 this week, his first-ever solo entry on the chart. This follows his appearance on Noah Kahan’s remix of “Everywhere, Everything.” Stick season anthem, reaching No. 79 in December.
“Gracie is truly one of those artist development stories brick by brick, building such a dedicated audience by following one fan at a time and never wanting to skip steps,” said Sam Riback, President of IGA and Head of Pop/Rock A&R. Billboard by email. “It was his connection with his fan base, built over a long period of time, that was truly unique and special when he first arrived on the mainstream scene. It’s this connection between Gracie and her fans that will propel her to the top and keep her there.
If Secret of us makes as big a statement as Abrams and his team hope, then “the summit” is definitely within his reach. Since she first spoke to Billboard less than a year and a half ago, the star almost doubled her number of listeners on Spotify (more than 15 million), landed her first Grammy nomination and established herself on the biggest tour of all the time.
On a more personal level, Abrams says she’s also more confident in herself — as a person and an artist — than she’s ever been. “I just know I trust myself solo,” she says. “This album means a lot to me because it supported me in a period of transition. I’ve learned how I like to spend my time, what works and doesn’t work for me in relationships, and how having friends is ultimately the priority for me. I don’t need to know who I want to wake up with every day, but I do know that I want to be there for every chapter of my friends’ lives.
“I learn every five seconds,” adds Abrams. “We’ll have to find out what all of this becomes of, but it’s me today.”
Gracie Abrams
Courtesy photo