Gracie Abrams Is Embracing Her Delusions

Abby Waisler

Lately, Gracie Abrams has been itching to move to New York permanently. She’s a California native, but now at 24, she’s feeling like the city matches her energy.

Like the city that never sleeps, Abrams feels like during the past year she, too, hasn’t stopped. After years of slowly building a fan base for her unique style of soulful yearning ballads that some call “sad girl” music, her career has hit a crescendo with the frenetic energy of a wave that hasn’t yet crested thanks in part to the fact that she was selected for literally the biggest stage in the world: Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. She opened several shows for Swift across the country in 2023, an experience that she compares to a crash college course in performing, and capped off the year with a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist.

Now, Abrams is gearing up for what looks to be her biggest year yet. Her sophomore album, The Secret of Us, which is out today, has already spawned her first top 40 hit in the UK, “Close to You,” and contains “us,” a much anticipated duet with Swift.

Earlier this month, Abrams announced her first headlining tour, which created some Swiftian levels of excitement from fans, who raced to Ticketmaster and posted online their screenshots of dreaded hours-long waiting rooms to snag a ticket. Abrams has already added additional tour dates to keep up with demand, a scenario she says she never had imagined.

“I did not expect people to care to this degree, and I’m really grateful that they do and I really care this much as well,” she says. “So I’m just excited to all be in the same room.”

If there’s anything a Gracie Abrams song evokes, it’s a specific feeling that is immediately recognizable to anyone who’s been a teenage girl. It’s those moments that you are so full of longing and lust and emotion and pent up frustration and maybe even rage, that you lock yourself in your childhood bedroom, lay on your bed, and just let it all out.

Abrams knows the feeling of having, well, too many feelings to face the world. Much of her early imagery—like her lyric video for 2020’s “I Miss You, I’m Sorry”—shows her in her room, in her bed, under her covers, putting into song lyrics her desperate yearning for love, for acceptance, for the type of strength to deal with the emotions of first heartbreak and becoming an adult in the world.

It’s the way Abrams has been expressing herself since she was a child. When she was small, she would sing to herself behind her bedroom door, letting out her feelings in the privacy of her own space, turning her trials and tribulations into words and melodies.

“I was really shy about it, but my mom in particular knew that this was truly what I fell in love with as a small, small, small person,” she recalls. “And even when I would pretend that it wasn’t true, she was like, ‘Okay, yeah, well, we hear you girl!’”

Her singing and performing career, as she explains it, was almost more a practicality, a means to an end to let out the artistry inside her.

“Music is obviously something that then gets performed in theory, but I wasn’t like, ‘I want to be a singer. I want to be on stage,’” she says. “I just loved writing and no one else was going to sing my songs.”

In many ways, Abrams’s inner life hasn’t changed that much. In her recent music video for the first single off The Secret of Us, “Risk,” Abrams starts out again, yes, in her bedroom, screaming and exercising the demons of uncontrollable feelings out of herself. But this time, she leaves, flinging herself into the outside world in accordance with the lyrics of the song, which discuss the merits of shooting your shot with someone you have a crush on, despite all the things that could go wrong.

It’s the more grown-up version of Abrams, taking her inner world that so many fans relate to and jumping out into the scary world of adulthood in your 20s. The album charts this weird and wonderful time in a young adult’s life, where everything feels simultaneously incredibly exciting and ridiculously fraught. Abrams cowrote the songs with her best friend Audrey Hobert (who also directed the “Risk” music video), and says the songs are rooted in what she calls their “delusional imaginations,” and their attempts to untangle these messes of feelings.

“Falling for someone when you’re in your 20s, it’s grounded in very little reality, but a lot of projection,” she says. “It feels crazy internally. It feels like a sickness or something.”

It’s a feeling that she wanted the album to evoke in its imagery too. Abrams released a series of covers for the album, all of which feature her face close-up on a white background making a different, semi-ridiculous face. I tell her I love the offbeat imagery and she laughs.

“A lot of people hated it,” she says. “It was funny. I fucking love it.”

She explains the expressions: one of her looking off camera and unsure; one of her looking indignant but also amused; and another, where her eyes are literally half open.

“I wanted to have something that was tapping into the title of the album, seeing something off out of the frame and having a reaction to it, or different reactions to something happening off frame,” she says. The photo where her eyes are half open is supposed to depict, she says, her rolling her eyes mid-roll, literally saying, “Whatever.”

In her mind, the album is also much more “extroverted.” The girl in her bedroom is stepping out, evolving, and living, and is older and more experienced. Abrams is particularly excited to perform this album specifically on tour because of everything she learned under the tutelage of Eras and Swift.

“I felt like I was just learning every second of being there onstage, offstage, backstage, the whole thing, watching every single one of the shows that I opened for, it felt as historic as it was,” she says. “It felt mega important and valuable. So few people get to experience the kind of perspective from which I was able to study it.”

She also was surprised to find herself less nervous than she expected her first few shows.

“It was really welcoming, and that’s obviously a testament to Taylor and to her fan base and the relationship that they’ve built over the years, and I’m one of the fans, so I was like, Oh, I feel like I totally belong in this room as someone who’s equally in love with Taylor and her music as everybody else is,” she says.

The tour and newfound friendship with Swift led the two to even collaborate on “us,” their song on The Secret of Us (and it’s especially secret: It’s the only one that was not released to the media prior to the album’s release). Swift rarely appears on songs for other artists, and usually only does so for close collaborators like The National, Haim, and Sugarland, the country group for whom she has written several songs. But the way Abrams tells it, the story of “us” was as organic as it could be.

“We were at dinner and we had a lot of Cosmos,” she says with a laugh. “And we were talking about our lives and talking about our experiences that fueled our albums. She was in the middle of Tortured Poets at the time, and I was in the middle of this, and we just got so excited talking about it. She was like, we have to go back to the house and listen to everything.”

They went back to Swift’s house around midnight, and sat in her kitchen, going song for song, as Abrams put it. Swift would listen to a Secret of Us track, and then Abrams would listen to Tortured Poets.

“We were theater kids in the kitchen, kind of just performing our songs to each other,” she says. “It was the best night ever.”

Then, they started playing music sent to them by Aaron Dessner, the producer whom they both collaborated with on their separate projects. Something clicked.

“There was this one piece that we both connected to, and we just immediately started writing a song until six in the morning,” she says. “It totally couldn’t have been less planned, but it was the most fun. It was very kind of chaotic in the best way, just electric energized conversations that led to the song that we both really deeply love.… I feel obviously wildly lucky that she is on this album for many reasons. One of them being that the way our song came together was the same way that all the songs Audrey and I wrote came together. Just really having super-important conversations with your girlfriends, and then translating those and turning them into [a song].”

For Abrams, these moments of exploding her feelings into a song are a type of catharsis, a moment of connection with a friend that encapsulates everything she likes about songwriting. But she’s growing up, too, and she’s ready to bring her fans with her.

“I feel like through this experience, my instinct now isn’t to get small and quiet when I’m nervous about something or someone, but rather to share it a little bit loudly,” she says. “And so I hope that they feel compelled to try that and see if it feels better for them, because it certainly felt better for me.”

Originally Appeared on Glamour