Gracie Abrams Readies for Her Spotlight

There are plenty of performers who will recount how they always knew they wanted to be in front of a crowd, how they tortured their families growing up with living room concerts.

Gracie Abrams is no such performer. The 23-year-old has always been shy about performing live, to the point that it nearly held her back from pursuing music at all.

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“I actively avoided it for sure,” Abrams says over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “And I think that’s why even having feedback from strangers on clips of songs as I was growing up, the reason I didn’t believe in it further was just because I had no interest in performing in front of an audience live. I was so afraid of that. It was truly like natural disasters and live performing were my red flags.”

But Abrams is facing her fears head-on this year, first releasing her debut album, “Good Riddance,” on Friday and later, by opening for none other than Taylor Swift on her Eras arena tour this summer.

Long before she wrapped her head around being a stage performer, Abrams was writing in her journal as a kid. Growing up, her parents, J.J. Abrams and Katie McGrath, had a piano in the house, which Gracie Abrams calls “a blessing” as she eventually found her way to it, “tinkering, but very privately.” Eventually, she married the tinkering with the journaling, and songs emerged.

Gracie Abrams’ album cover

Despite the music-forward house — and the fact that her parents are entrenched in Hollywood — Abrams never considered music to be a path she’d take professionally.

“[There was] no real obvious direct influence in terms of, ‘I want to be an artist one day’ by any means,” she says. “I was actively like, ‘How do I never show this to anybody else?’”

The road to “Good Riddance” has been a few years long, with most of the success and attention coming during the pandemic years, while Abrams was at home. She says that now, emerging with her debut album, she’s been surprised by the number of fans she has and the lengths her music has reached.

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“There’s been this ‘head down, write the next thing, keep working super hard’ [approach],” she says. “Almost a lack of acknowledgement of the things that have built up and luckily put me in the position to be releasing music and have more of an audience than I think I realized earlier.”

Gracie Abrams

That audience includes Swift, who tapped Abrams to be one of her openers for this summer’s tour.

“I feel that most of my time on that tour will be spent just quietly observing the way that she does it. Because there’s no greater gift in terms of learning from the best that there is, and she fills a room better than anyone I’ve ever met,” Abrams says. “And so I think I very much trust the experience blindly already because I know her fans too — I am a part of that. I’m a part of the thing. I feel there might be something that’s almost comforting about being in spaces that are of that scale with like-minded people, in at least that one way, just having immense amounts of love for her. I feel safe because of that.”

In the meantime, there’s her album release to celebrate once it’s out Friday. True to form, Abrams plans to keep it low-key.

“I want to make some pasta,” she says. “Probably just some pasta, and have four people over, and hang out with my dog.”

Gracie Abrams

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