Gracie Abrams

Los Angeles singer/songwriter Gracie Abrams has a talent for cutting to the quick. A song about a breakup’s messy aftermath, “21” opens bluntly with the line: “I missed your 21st birthday.” Another song about finding it hard to move on revolves around the simple admission, “I miss you, I’m sorry.” Abrams’ swift incisions are particularly notable given that her father is director J.J. Abrams, whose television series Lost boasted such ingeniously convoluted plotlines. Born in 1999, the Los Angeles native grew up listening to Joni Mitchell and Elliott Smith, but it wasn’t until she discovered Phoebe Bridgers, at age 13, that she began writing her own songs. She wrote “minor”—about a crush who lived too far away for her to visit before curfew—at age 17. “It was the first time that I’d written a song where I felt like I wasn’t trying to emulate someone else’s sound,” she tells Apple Music. Even Abrams’ early singles display a wisdom beyond her years. Released when she was 20, “21” revolves around the devastating line, “You’ll be the love of my life when I was young”—an elegant example of her knack for turning an idea as simple as “young love” into a complex meditation on life’s changes. “Looking back is unattractive to me,” she acknowledges, yet while preparing her first long-form statement—2020’s minor—she realised she needed to reflect to move forward. “Thinking about what that meant and how the songs needed to exist together,” she says, the experience of writing “minor” as a teen never went away. “It was always in the back of my head. I didn’t want to run away from it.”