Maybe Gracie Abrams messed up something at some point in her life, but certainly not her latest single.
Gracie is an extremely talented 21-year-old from Los Angeles. She started on YouTube by posting covers and snippets of her songs. I remember watching her videos while sitting on the floor in the room crying to her poignant lyrics. Now the singer has an EP, ‘minor’, released last year and appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and at the Grammy Museum.
Gracie sings mostly in her lyrics about relationships, a broken heart, and the circumstances of loving someone but not being able to be with them. In her previous songs, she often blamed the other person for the breakdown of their relationship. In the song ‘Friend’ she asks: ‘Funny how you feel like we would ever talk again / How could you think I’d be your friend.’
However, in her latest single, she looks at the past relationship from a different perspective. She talks about her mistakes and says that she made a wrong choice leaving the person she loved and that she didn’t fight more for their connection.
Gracie is incredibly vulnerable in all of her lyrics, but this one required a lot of maturity to say aloud that she is missing someone, admit that she regretted being passive and giving up too soon. In the bridge, Abrams admits to thinking about what if… ‘I keep thinking maybe if you let me back in’.
She explains the pain that accompanies an unexplored feeling. She says that if her chosen one gave her a second chance, they could fix what was wrong. But she knows it’s too late for that, he is happy and she has to move on.
The video clip accompanying the song and directed by Matty Peacock is the best one so far. It is poetic, honest, and entirely metaphorical. Throughout the song, Gracie bakes a cake that she intends to give to her boyfriend, but every time she leaves the house, she’s ending up stumbling and dropping it to the ground.
After a few tries, she decides to make a smaller, funny-looking cake that finally reaches its destination. The whole video is a beautiful metaphor for a relationship in which there is a lot of joy and love, but communication is weak, so something goes wrong all the time.
‘Mess It Up’ is the next stage in Gracie’s musical journey, which is constantly discovering its new possibilities. Among upcoming young musicians, she is surely one of the most worth listening to. Her lyrics are full of depth, pain, sincerity, and nostalgia. She is often compared to Taylor Swift because of her way of writing, but I believe that she has her own incredibly original style and voice.
Gracie, despite having a loyal group of fans, is still quite undervalued and really has everything to become a great pop star, which proposes a beautiful sound and poetic lyrics.
The author of the popular song ‘I miss you I’m sorry’ is just starting, but it is already obvious that we will not forget about her for a long time. I recommend everyone to sit comfortably with a bowl full of ice cream, tissues and listen to all her songs, including the one-minute clips on YouTube if you are interested in Gracie at her most vulnerable.
Rating: 8/10
By Lilia Hadj Said
Feature Image Credit: Interscope Records