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For Gracie Abrams, writing songs is a matter of stripping away all artifice and getting to the raw truth of her experience: her desires and infatuations, missteps, and small triumphs. In the making of her debut album Good Riddance, the 23-year-old artist deliberately slipped into a secluded creative environment for the sake of magnifying her music’s lived-in intimacy—a carefully honed quality that’s won her a devoted following and recently led to such milestones as opening for Taylor Swift on her blockbuster Eras Tour. Created in close collaboration with The National’s Aaron Dessner (her sole producer/co-writer on the album), Good Riddance ultimately documents a particularly painful and transformative period in Abrams’s life, imbuing every track with an unvarnished honesty that’s equal parts captivating and cathartic.
“All of these songs are so explicit in terms of saying exactly what I was feeling at the time, to the point that it scares me—it definitely makes my stomach hurt to listen back,” says Abrams. “But Aaron has constantly reminded me that all the artists I’ve ever loved have asked themselves that same question of, ‘Is this too much?’ It’s a tough line to walk, but I think anytime you feel something so deeply and you’re able to express that feeling, it means that someone else might find a connection in it. And that’s the whole point of writing songs in the first place.”
The follow-up to This Is What It Feels Like (a 2021 project made with the likes of longtime Lorde collaborator Joel Little), Good Riddance came to life in a series of free-flowing sessions at Long Pond Studio (the Hudson Valley home base for Dessner, whose production discography includes his GRAMMY® -winning work on Taylor Swift’s folklore). “It was like we were creating in a very tiny bubble, which felt like such a safe space to work through what I needed to process in these songs,” says Abrams. A thrilling evolution of the self-recorded songs she first began sharing in her late teens, Good Riddance embodies a spacious yet elaborately detailed form of alt-pop. “As I’ve gotten to know myself better, I’ve gotten the confidence to do what feels right for my music rather than getting caught up in what pop should sound like or what might be working for other young women in the industry,” says Abrams. “Breaking out of L.A. and being in a quieter space, I was able to throw all that out the window and end up creating something that doesn’t really feel like anything I’ve done before.”