‘If I could have my way, I would be in the dark forever’: Backstage with Gracie Abrams

It’s the final night of Gracie Abrams’ tour, and she sounds like she needs a rest. Backstage, in the 24-year-old songwriter’s dressing room at Forum Melbourne, the bench on her mirrored vanity holds zippered pouches of make-up, handheld humidifiers (plural) to comfort her vocal cords, and no fewer than three takeaway containers of soup – “Every version of soup possible!” she laughs with a rasp.

Outside, on the sunny early evening streets, the hottest ticket in town is not for the match at Rod Laver Arena, but the sold-out concert of searching, synthy ballads. Hundreds of Abrams’ fans – many of them young women, almost all of them wearing ribbons tied into bows in their hair, as was her signature before she lopped it off into a chic, wavy bob – snake around both sides of the venue, camping out on folding chairs, decorating signs and drawing on one another’s hands. En masse, they give the appearance of schoolgirls who got lost on the way to Hanging Rock and wound up eating Subway and charging their phones on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Many of them were at the show the previous night, too. Remnants of their adoration – bouquets of flowers, letters and other gifts – sit on the leather sofa in Abrams’ dressing room, and have been collected into piles around the green room.

Fans of Gracie Abrams attend her second sold-out Melbourne show.Credit: Martin Philbey

To her fans, Abrams feels like a best friend and a hero, one whose whisper-sung confessions have taken her from her bedroom in Los Angeles to stages across the world. She might have a Grammy nomination now, but she still feels like theirs.

During the Good Riddance Tour – which takes its name from her debut record, released in February – Abrams and her band have played across the United States, Europe, the UK and Australia since last March. She took a detour to open for her hero and friend Taylor Swift’s record-breaking Eras Tour in the middle, and will rejoin Swift for 18 more dates at the tail-end of this year.

At 20, Abrams had decided to take a leave of absence from university (she was studying international relations at Barnard College in New York City) to focus on music. She released her first two singles in 2019, and had an EP, Minor, ready to drop and tour in 2020. But we know what happened then.

From the bedroom of her childhood home – where she and her two brothers grew up with their parents, film director and Lost creator J.J. Abrams, and producer Katie McGrath – she performed live for the first time, not to a sold-out room but to fans over Zoom. It turned out to be the best thing to happen to her.

“I wasn’t ready, internally, at all. I was really terrified.” She’d always wanted to be a writer – the style or medium didn’t come into focus until her teens, but “writing was always my safe space outside of everything. It was what I always returned to at the end of the day from when I was so little.”

But performing and singing in front of audiences had no lure for Abrams. “I was just very introverted, and the idea of being on an elevated surface and kind of reciting these confessional poems turned into songs … it wasn’t appealing for the longest time. Until I did it for the first time and I really fell in love with it.”

Gracie Abrams performs in Melbourne on Monday night.Credit: Martin Philbey

Abrams opens her show in darkness. The house lights point not on her face but on the audience. She is visible in silhouette, with only the fans closest to the stage able to make out her freckled face, the gap in her smile, and her just-pinched rosy cheeks. Then she arrives at the second verse on opening track Where Do We Go Now?, the drums kick in and Abrams is thrown into sharp relief to riotous cheers from the crowd, who sing every word.

“If I could have my way, I would be in the dark forever,” Abrams laughs. “This particular album … a lot of it felt very isolated and kind of internal. Me being not super visible [is] half for a big reveal, but also for comfort.”

She made the album with The National’s Aaron Dessner at his Long Pond Studio in upstate New York, and has been back as often as she can to work on the follow-up. She once sang of feeling homesick, anticipating how much she’ll want to return home when she finally moves away. But with her “tour family” and Dessner’s actual one providing so much familiarity, she admits that she now likes her own space.

“I feel restless when I go back [home] now. I’ve spent more time with [my crew] the past two years than my own family by a landslide, and so that has made it less hard to be away.”

Abrams will head to the Grammys in a couple of weeks. She’s nominated for Best New Artist – the category that’s made winners of Amy Winehouse, Mariah Carey, Adele, Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, the latter of whom’s breakout single Drivers License was inspired in part by Abrams’ Minor EP.

To her fans, Gracie Abrams feels like a best friend and a hero.Credit: Martin Philbey

She’s always watched the livestreamed nominations, and this year was no different. “I was [at home] in New York, and I was in my bed with my heating pad on. When the category came up, my name was called out first, and it was just this very weird kind of fever dream situation.”

Her first call was to her mother. “And then within 10 seconds, Noah Kahan called me.” Kahan, a singer-songwriter who’ll play his own Melbourne headline show on Tuesday night, duetted with Abrams on the recent single Everywhere, Everything, and is nominated alongside her at the Grammys. “And we were just screaming at each other. I love him.”

Later, her best friend and former college roommate took her for French toast and coffee, “and mimosas”.

“We were like, What do we do? So I went on a walk by myself through New York, headphones in, listening to Taylor’s music.” Which album? “1989. That’s the New York album we all know and love.” Naturally.

The first time Abrams stepped on stage to play a concert, she was gripped with anxiety. The night before she couldn’t stop vomiting. “I felt like I was at odds with myself in more ways than one. It’s a weird thing to form an identity as an artist publicly when you’re not totally sure you have a grip on yourself in private,” she says.

‘It’s a weird thing to form an identity as an artist publicly when you’re not totally sure you have a grip on yourself in private.’Credit: Martin Philbey

Some songs on the set list feel like they’re from “a different life”, Abrams says. “I don’t connect with a lot of them any more, but I connect with my audience through those songs and that makes me appreciate them in a new way.”

The faith and trust Dessner showed in her “propelled [her] into this different place” as an artist. It’s no wonder she’s returned to it as often as her schedule allows.

“The music that I’ve made this past year feels so much more sure of itself, and it feels so much lighter. I’ve never had more fun writing than I’ve had with this new work. It’s deeply bittersweet that this is the last show tonight, but I’m really ready for the next tour.”

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