How Gracie Abrams turned an ‘insatiable’ crush into a No. 1 album

En route to meet Gracie Abrams in Marylebone, I come across a post of Mary Oliver’s poem “Little Love Song” on the Instagram account @poetryisnotaluxury. A melodic quatern, the poem details lovelorn melancholy, ending with the line “softly my right hand fondles my left hand / as though it were you”. Right under the post it reads, ‘liked by gracieabrams and others’.

A quick scroll through the page, filled with similar wistful yet hopeful poems, and you’ll see Abrams as a frequent liker. When I mention it to her, she smiles. “It’s my favourite account in the world,” she says. “I DM them as a fan.” Ordinarily, this would be the ‘small talk’ segment of an interview, where both interviewer and interviewee tiptoe around feelings of awkwardness. But with Abrams – who is quickly becoming one of her generation’s key pop It girls, her songs articulating emotions so intense they feel visceral (and to me, relatable) – there is no talk about the weather or conversation about our weekends. Instead, after her team brings me through to the tiny corner of Chiltern Firehouse where she is sitting in a beige oversized leather trenchcoat – and after she takes my bag out of my hands to let me sit down comfortably – we get straight to talking about poetry.

For the past year, the 24-year-old artist has been on the road, both on her own tour and as an opener for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. Amid the chaos of tour life, she has been travelling with her favourite poetry anthology, Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation – which features work from the likes of Seamus Heaney, Marie Howe, Emily Dickinson and Mary Oliver. “[It has] really soul-crushing and energising poetry about all different kinds of love and loss. I always feel like poetry has been a meditation for me.” As the waiter brings out our drinks, she smiles warmly at him, before carefully pouring out a peppermint tea for me and a ginger tea for herself.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Abrams is the only daughter of director JJ Abrams and producer and activist Katie McGrath – a privilege she has always acknowledged and been publicly grateful for. Having grown up surrounded by creativity, she discovered music early, when her third-grade teacher assigned her class the task of daily journalling. She quickly fell in love with it, until she woke up one day and realised the journal had been lost. “I was so angry,” she told me. “So I sat in the garage and banged on the drums about losing my journal and how devastating that felt. It was the equivalent of sprinting really hard until you want to vomit.” That experience led to her writing her first-ever song.

When we speak about LA, she asks me what I think about it, having recently visited. I tell her truthfully it’s great, but there’s an unspoken darkness to it. She nods in agreement. “I’ve spent so much of my life there and I’m on the same page,” she says “I’m getting out of there, hardcore fast.” She has her eyes set on New York City – where she lived in 2018 during her brief stint as an International Relations major at Barnard College, before she dropped out to pursue music full-time.

It was back in 2019, just after her freshman year, that she released her first EP minor, a seven-song reflection of teenage love disrupted by curfews, insecurities and heartbreak. The night before we meet, the EP turns four years old. Today, the matters of the project feel like something of a distant memory. “So much life happens in four years, music aside entirely,” she says. “It’s just so crazy to think of putting out anything as the person I was then.” The project was followed by her second EP, This Is What It Feels Like, in 2021, and her 2023 debut album Good Riddance. The latter earned her first Grammy nomination for Best New Artist. As I mention the accomplishment to her, she almost chokes on her tea, as if she is hearing the news for the very first time.

She describes these more traditional accomplishments as “the wild cherry on top” of doing a job that makes her feel closer to herself. But really, the true prize is being able to spend most of her life writing. “If I were doing something else I know, regardless of what that thing is, I would be waiting for the day to end to go home and write,” she says. “I feel so privileged that I’ve been given these opportunities to spend my time this way.”

Now almost 25, her confessional, stream-of-consciousness style of writing has remained. Her latest offering, The Secret of Us, was released earlier this summer and birthed from an insatiable crush; the kind that makes you feel as if you are the first person to experience pain in that way. Passionate and intense, the tracks take you through the journey of both real and imagined scenarios. On “Let It Happen” she sings “you’re probably out somewhere while I’m in my underwear eating through my feelings / if you would still have me, I’ll be waiting all my life”. And on songs such as “Free Now” she says: “If you find yourself out / if there is a right time / chances are I’ll be here / we could share a lifeline”.

Some have speculated that some of the songs are about her rumoured partner Paul Mescal (on “Normal Thing” she sings “It’s a normal thing to fall in love with movie stars”) with whom she has recently been spotted – though it’s something she’s yet to comment publicly on. “I felt so insane about this person and I felt so all over the place with touring in a way that was kind of conducive to writing the album because of the chaos of living a very peripatetic life,” she says of the inspiration behind the songs. “My brain and my heart were being pulled in a trillion different directions. It all worked to infuse a real drama into all the songs.”

“The internet is made up of light and joy-seeking missiles. Paying too much mind to that only distracts from the real-life joy and light I can find and touch if I’m not spending my time scrolling” – Gracie Abrams

There has been plenty of speculation in the press about her dating life, but Abrams has a resilience to outside noise, which she exercises like a muscle. Whether it’s her background, the person she is dating or her music, she has found herself at the centre of many internet discourses over the years. “Internet commentary is really dangerous to consider deeply. I feel that about everything, not just my own music,” she explains. “Obviously there is ‘Hopecore’ that exists online and I will always watch that shit and cry.” The tears for the emotive compilations of optimism (think: videos of deaf children hearing for the first time, inspirational quotes and people reunited with their long-distance families) come from how rare positivity online is. “The internet is made up of light and joy-seeking missiles. Paying too much mind to that only distracts from the real-life joy and light I can find and touch if I’m not spending my time scrolling.”

While the majority of TSOU focuses on one relationship, the album also delves into different topics, including the beauty of platonic connections. On “Tough Love” she sings, “no chance I waste my twenties on random men / not one of them is smarter than all my friends”. Aside from regular collaborator, The National’s Aaron Dessner, most of the album was written with her best friend, LA-based filmmaker Audrey Hobert, who is also in her mid-twenties.

The two met at Abrams’ fifth-grade graduation. Standing outside their school bathroom, Hobert spotted Abrams wearing the same white hi-top Converses she wore to her own fifth-grade graduation the year before. Hobert stopped Abrams to speak to her about the shoes, and now, over a decade later, the pair live together. “[She’s] such a rare person,” Abrams says of Hobert. “We just skip all these layers of communication and get each other really deeply. She and I talked about it a lot, our friendship is the most fulfilling relationship in our lives.”

Alongside writing most of the album together, sitting on the sofa in their home, Hobert also directed the music videos for “Risk” and “I Love You, I’m Sorry”. Satirical and cinematic, the videos show a new playful side of Abrams and highlight the power of working with collaborators who understand your vision. “[It’s] pure heaven on earth,” Hobert tells me, discussing the process of working together. “Since [Gracie] and I became friends, the pure joy of our soul connection was just all I could ever ask for in this life. Then suddenly to have an incredible creative connection with her – it’s just the icing on the cake.” Both Abrams and Hobert describe working together as a ‘drug’. “[Gracie is] very smart, very funny, she is a sensitive soul and incredibly thoughtful,” adds Hobert. “She’s a dreamer, sharp as a tack and an artist. She is the moment.”

To enter Abrams’ world, it helps to have an overactive imagination, so you can lean into the dreams and scenarios she is singing about. Her relationship with her own imagination is complicated: she acknowledges she loves its power, but notes that it can also be “a torture device”. As Gen Zs who spent emotionally formative years isolated from others, I ask whether she thinks our sense of yearning for deep connection, which is carefully detailed throughout her project, was impacted by the pandemic. “It’s real-time we all missed out on that many of us deeply crave,” she says. “So any sign of potential connection with someone that makes you slightly excited, I can only speak for myself, throws me into a tailspin… apparently.”

Today, Abrams is six weeks away from her biggest solo tour yet and, as a “formally introverted person”, is ready to face intense feelings head-on – no matter how painful they may appear. “There’s something so special and underrated about screaming about what embarrasses you instead of getting quiet. It’s why I’m so excited for the tour.”

On paper, Abrams is the furthest thing from your average 24-year-old: a number one album, a Grammy nomination and over 40 shows opening for one of the biggest artists in the world. But walking away from our time together, it’s clear she has an earthy open-heartedness towards love that I spot in most peers in their early or mid-twenties. She speaks to me as you would any old friend: to anyone walking past, we would appear as two young women drinking tea and giggling about their crushes. It’s clear that Abrams’ power is detailing her inner world through her music in a way that feels familiar for all, even twenty-somethings in rooms worlds away from her own.

The Secret of Us tour starts September 5.