Someplace on Gracie Abrams’ digital camera roll is a video of Taylor Swift within the pop famous person’s kitchen in Tribeca, deliriously extinguishing a bonfire threatening to devour her heart island.
Behind the lens, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter cry-laughs as her childhood hero works fearlessly to save lots of them from hazard. They’d each distantly heard the candle fall over earlier that night time, however Swift had assured Abrams it was most likely considered one of her cats thumping round. It’s nicely previous 6 a.m., after an evening of dinner and drinks – heavy on that second factor — when the fireplace lastly goes out.
“She was such a legend – I don’t understand how at this hour or in our state she knew what to do,” Abrams raves to Billboard six months later over Zoom. “We each had an insane cough from the fireplace extinguisher fumes for weeks.”
The pair had simply completed co-writing “Us,” the crown jewel of the California native’s 13-track sophomore studio album The Secret of Us – due out this Friday (June 21) — when the fiasco occurred. Earlier than that, they’d spent the night time previewing songs from Abrams’ new report and the 34-year-old hitmaker’s The Tortured Poets Division for one another earlier than both mission had even been introduced. Abrams remembers singing and dancing “like theater children” to “However Daddy I Love Him” and mendacity on the ground in disbelief after listening to “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” after which they began listening to instrumentals made by their mutual collaborator and good friend Aaron Dessner.
“One thing caught our ear on the identical time very onerous and quick,” Abrams says. “So we ran to the piano and began penning this track … I used to fantasize about that sort of a factor as a child.”
“Us” ended up being the ribbon that tied collectively the fabric Abrams had been dreaming up with Dessner at his famed Lengthy Pond Studios final 12 months, after spending the summer season opening for Swift’s Eras Tour, a task she’ll reprise on choose dates in North America later this fall. Shortly after their near-death expertise, the 2 ladies headed upstate to report the duet with the 48-year-old Nationwide founder, who remembers: “It was simply actually enjoyable to look at the chemistry of Gracie and Taylor bouncing off one another, Gracie in complete surprise and awe watching how Taylor data and produces her vocal performances and builds the world.”
“Taylor’s good at synthesizing a complete story,” Dessner continues over Zoom, the picket panels of Lengthy Pond’s inside making up his backdrop. “[That song] simply introduced all the pieces [about Gracie’s album] into focus in a lovely manner.”
Even with out Swift’s title on the credit, The Secret of Us is definitely Abrams’ most mainstream-friendly mission so far. Although nonetheless rife with acoustic guitars and Dessner’s signature woodsiness, the mission is sharper, hookier and extra extroverted than ever, with mild synths and the occasional ghost of a dance beat injecting newfound adrenaline into its DNA. The sound is greatest exemplified by Abrams’ most-recent single “Near You,” which dropped earlier this month and is already shaping as much as be her splashiest hit but.
Abrams hadn’t got down to write a brand new album so rapidly after her debut report Good Riddance dropped February 2023, peaking at No. 52 on the Billboard 200 — a lot much less one which sounds so distinctly totally different from her previous work. However the songs simply stored coming to her as intuitively as on that spontaneous night time in New York, lots of them about unrequited love so robust it “felt like a illness,” she says.
“I didn’t even assume we have been making [an album], and neither did Gracie,” says Dessner. “The primary track that we made is ‘Gave You I Gave You I.’ That instantly established a really totally different palette and sonic world, and it developed from there.”
“We simply had fun realizing that we are able to make issues that sound completely totally different,” Abrams provides. “It was permission, this album, to strive regardless of the f—ok we would like.”
This time round, the duo – who first teamed up on Abrams’ 2021 EP This Is What It Feels Like — additionally had a cowriter within the singer’s greatest good friend since she was 10, Audrey Hobert. Abrams and Hobert have technically been working collectively since they have been in center college, writing and directing Video Star motion pictures collectively, however the tracks on Secret of Us co-penned by Hobert mark her first foray into songwriting.
The good friend duo’s closeness allowed Abrams to be extra weak than she ever may’ve been with every other collaborator, and Hobert even stars as a foremost character within the bittersweet lyrics to “Good Luck Charlie,” which the previous says is about observing a relationship finish between two associates and “having plenty of love for each folks … half mourning it and half wishing nicely on everybody concerned.” (The title, she clarifies, is completely unrelated to the Disney Channel present of the identical title — “I wasn’t a Disney child rising up … I really feel like I missed out.”)
“I belief her with my life, and he or she is aware of me so nicely,” Abrams says of her good friend. “There was no pretending.”
Plus, after hitting the highway with Swift, Abrams realized she was able to carry out music that commanded just a little extra presence within the stadiums she was warming up, which she hopes to translate to her personal headlining tour of theater-sized venues throughout the U.S. kicking off Sept. 5 in Portland. That’s why you’ll hear her correctly belting for the primary time in a number of locations on The Secret of Us, as teased in lead single “Threat,” which dropped Could 1.
“I feel it’s simply time,” she says of honing her vocal skills. “I wasn’t a singer. I used to be a author, and nobody else would sing my songs once I was little. I used to be singing my songs to myself in my room, so it didn’t require a lot projection. I may keep very quiet and curled up right into a ball. Being onstage, it’s a special sport.”
However as her star has risen with Eras publicity and residual Good Riddance hype – and as naysayers have lastly moved on from poking at her “nepo child” standing, being the daughter of director J.J. Abrams — her singing chops have invited some criticism, despite the fact that her crackling alto is the factor many followers love most about her.
“There are vocalists which might be price calling out [for their skills], and that’s not me,” Abrams admits. “I like to sing so f—king a lot, as a result of I like to sing issues that I write. It’s an extension of the writing for me, so I’m all the time attempting to enhance upon that ability. However I wouldn’t lead with ‘I’m a singer.’ I’d say, ‘I’m a author.’”
Abrams and Dessner are already engaged on the previous’s subsequent mission — “We don’t know what it’s but,” she says, “however we’ve been making a bunch of latest music that feels already wildly totally different from this album.” Nonetheless, she feels just like the type and material of Secret of Us is totally evocative of her present frame of mind, versus previous works that felt like “revisiting previous wounds” to carry out reside.
“It could really feel like this humorous ghost,” Abrams provides. “And with The Secret of Us, it feels very topical nonetheless. That’s so me.”
If there’s one exception, although, it’s “Near You,” which Abrams first recorded seven years in the past with producer Sam de Jong earlier than scrapping it, feeling unready to embrace such a distinctly pop sound. That didn’t cease followers from obsessing over a seconds-long snippet of the observe Abrams uploaded on-line final decade, and he or she’s been receiving nearly day by day requests – plus some light pushing from her group at Interscope – to launch it ever since.
With Secret of Us being as pop-facing as it’s, “Near You” lastly has a house that is sensible. It seems on the very finish of the tracklist and serves because the second single, with Abrams formally dropping it to followers’ elation June 7. (For these questioning whether or not one other years-old cast-off, the deeply Swiftian “In Between,” will get the identical second-life remedy, Abrams teases it’s “trying like a deluxe state of affairs.”)
Her label’s endurance was rewarded, with the observe debuting at No. 49 on the Billboard Scorching 100 this week, her first-ever solo entry on the chart. It follows her look on the remix to “All over the place, Every little thing,” Noah Kahan’s Stick Season anthem, reaching No. 79 in December.
“Gracie is really a kind of brick-by-brick artist improvement tales, constructing such a devoted following one fan at a time and by no means desirous to skip steps,” Sam Riback, president of IGA and head of Pop/Rock A&R, tells Billboard over e mail. “It was her connection to her fanbase, constructed over a protracted time period, that was actually distinctive and particular to her arrival on the mainstream stage. It’s that bond between Gracie and her followers that may propel her all the way in which to the highest and maintain her there.”
If Secret of Us makes as massive a press release as Abrams and her group hope it does, then “the highest” is unquestionably in attain. Since she first spoke to Billboard lower than a 12 months and a half in the past, the star has almost doubled her Spotify listener rely (15 million+), picked up her first Grammy nomination and held her personal on the largest tour of all time.
On a extra private entrance, Abrams says she’s additionally extra confident – as an individual and artist – than she’s ever been earlier than. “I simply know that I belief myself solo,” she says. “This album has meant a lot to me as a result of it has supported me by a interval of transitions. I’ve realized about how I wish to spend my time, about what works for me or doesn’t in relationships, about how having associates is finally the precedence for me. I don’t must know who I wish to get up subsequent to on daily basis, however I do know that I wish to be there for each chapter of my associates’ lives.”
“I’m studying each 5 seconds,” Abrams provides. “We’ll have to seek out out what all of it turns into, however that’s me immediately.”
Gracie Abrams
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