Gracie Abrams’ new single ‘Amelie’: 4:20 of calm and melancholy
You may know her from opening Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour Tour last year or, like me, you may be able to say that you discovered her music before she hit the spotlight. Regardless, Gracie Abrams will with certainty be on your radar by the end of 2023.
The 23-year-old American singer-songwriter released her debut EP Minor back in 2020, followed by her second EP This Is What It Feels Like in 2021. Gracie recently sat down and spoke to Rolling Stone about all things music: her songwriting, musical influences, and her career. The article describes Abrams as “Gen Z’s melancholy maven and one of pop’s buzziest young artists”, saying that her debut album Good Riddance, out February 24th, shows “a serious command of autobiographical songwriting”.
Following the January release of the second single, ‘Where do we go now?, off her upcoming debut album, Abrams played a few solo acoustic shows across the UK. Yesterday, she dropped the third single off the album – ‘Amelie’.
Like with all of Gracie’s music, ‘Amelie’ gives you an instant feeling of calm. The soft acoustic ballad starts off with a playful guitar riff. Together with Abram’s whispering vocals, the guitar picking continues throughout, creating the perfect campfire core song. Rolling Stone illustrates it as “dreams and reality blur[ring] together”, and shares how the song “recalls a brief but impactful interaction with a girl who is now a figure in her distant past and who she can’t quite recall if she ever knew at all.”
Already in the opening verse, the initial stage of the interaction is captured perfectly: “I met a girl once/She sorta ripped me open/She doesn’t even know it/She doesn’t know my name/We sat on the sofa/She asked me a million questions/I answered and by eleven/Memorized her face.” The doubt and uncertainty of the interaction are later expressed in the chorus: “Where’d you go?/Or were you all in a dream/Amelie, Amelie?/I don’t know”.
“It is one of our favourites on the record”, Abrams writes on Instagram, the “our” referring to herself and Aaron Dessner – her producer, co-writer, and friend. With two of the twelve tracks released, the excitement for Gracie’s debut album is greater than ever. “It’s difficult to imagine these songs living anywhere other than my most secret places”, she says. “Writing this record allowed me to grow up in ways I need to. It forced me to reflect and be accountable. It allowed me to walk away from versions of myself that I no longer recognized. It allowed me to let go.”
Abrams is set to tour her album throughout this year. She will be starting off the Good Riddance Tour in Chicago this March, with a brief gap to open 30 dates on Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour across the US, to then continue her own tour across Europe in the fall. There is no doubt that 2023 is looking to be the biggest year yet for Gracie Abrams.
‘Amelie’ is out on streaming services now.
