INTERVIEW: Graace returns with new single 'Half Awake' and announces second EP 'Self Preservation': "I feel like I'm in my body again... It just feels very me."

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Jess Gleeson

Australia’s GRAACE today returns with her stunning new single ‘Half Awake’ and announces her second EP Self Preservation will be released in February.

‘Half Awake’ is a raw, haunting ballad that remembers the passing of her father ten years ago. Backed in the main by nothing but an acoustic guitar and subtle, distorted electronic sounds, the sparseness of the accompaniment allows GRAACE’s emotive, entrancing, heartbreaking voice to be the shining star of the track. “As someone who has dealt with death, it’s hard to sing about, but I personally love songs that are about loss,” GRAACE says. “So, I thought, why don’t I do that for the people who have lost someone in their lives? In January, it'll be 10 years since I lost my father. I think it’s kind of beautiful to finally be able to write about it, to move on and grow.”

‘Half Awake’ will feature on GRAACE’s second EP Self Preservation, out in February next year. The EP marks a turning point in GRAACE’s career, born out of the contemplation and reflection enforced by lockdown where she realised she no longer felt connected to the music she had been creating and made the move to return to her roots of honest, intimate more natural songwriting, citing Olivia Rodrigo and Phoebe Bridgers as major influences. “[It is] literally the polar opposite to [debut EP] Self Sabotage”, she says. “I think my growth in those three years was pretty immense emotionally. I love this EP so much because it's not just about heartbreak, I've finally been able to write about my father and things that are really, really personal.”

After breaking through in 2017 collaborating with Hayden James on the hit single ‘Numb’, GRAACE has become one of Australia’s most promising and popular young artists, with her singles attracting global streams in the millions. She has a remarkable ability to create music about her lived experiences that also allow us to use her songs to connect to our own stories, as well as being simply a delicious listening experience. Self Preservation promises to be an early 2022 highlight, and we recently caught up with GRAACE to find out more about this new era in her music.

GRAACE, hello you bloody lovely creature. You've been creating, you've been back on your guitar and you're releasing new music? How on earth are you?
Oh my gosh, I am fabulous. It feels incredible to feel like I'm in my body again, you know, playing guitar and playing piano. It just feels very me. It feels incredible, to be honest.

I like that and I always think artists and actually even those of us who consume music, it's very much a part of ourselves so I love the fact that you call it ‘you're back in your body again’. Now you have a glorious new single that has just hit us, ‘Half Awake’, and I just want to talk to you a little bit about that. It is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Can you talk me through the track?
Yeah, of course. This was probably the most intense song that I've ever released. I mean, I know that it's the most intense song that I've ever released. From a young age, I kind of created a world in my mind after my father passed, and the best way to explain it would be lucid dreaming. I vividly remember the week that he passed, I made an elevator in my head and that was kind of my goodbye to him, because it was a sudden death. Throughout my teenage years, I spent a lot of time alone, I'm quite introverted and I was just able to make this town in my head that my father was able to live in. It was really freaking cool to be able to see him when I was lucky enough. I've grown out of lucid dreaming a little bit of as I've gotten older, but it's something so beautiful that my young mind was able to create a safe space for myself. It helped with healing as well, and it felt very therapeutic to be there. Like everything, with lucid dreaming there's also the bad parts like nightmares and sleep paralysis and all that but I feel ‘Half Awake’ really explores the good and the bad of going through a sudden loss.

I'm actually so pleased you brought that out, because I love the contrast. Obviously there are a lot of songs out there about loss, but this is the first time I've heard can I say the spook brought into it?
Oh my god yes the music video is truly like a horror film. So yes!

It's gorgeous, and even the lyrics - ‘is it you breathing down the back of my neck?’
Yeah that line makes me icky, it feels gross. We kept using the word when we were doing the music video it just feels a bit icky, it feels eerie.

But it's so incredible. And I wanted to know, what was your thought process or your desire, at bringing a song about loss, and really bringing that element of fear into it? It’s very other, I love it.
Very, very other. I'm someone that believes in ghosts and all that stuff. It happened very naturally, we were writing it in a cabin, I wrote it with some really beautiful friends of mine that are really close to me down at Kangaroo Valley, which is south of Sydney. It's very isolated, and it's get kind of creepy. I was feeling very vulnerable and I was definitely at my breaking point of COVID and lockdowns and all that stuff. So I just decided to talk to my dad about it, because I felt very comfortable around them. When we were in the cabin, I just felt like something was there, I've had that feeling so many other times in situations where it just feels like someone's there. The song kind of merged into that. It was a sad, but also kind of a scary writing process.

We’ve mentioned that you've gone back to your piano and your guitar, and there's something very healing in that. Can you talk me through the catharsis of music for you and has it always had that effect?
Yeah, my dad actually got me into music. He was an avid music lover, and listener. He didn't really play but he really really loved listening. I started playing piano when I was about six, it's always been around. I did guitar lessons. I taught myself songwriting and singing. I loved listening to Joni Mitchell growing up and people like Daughter and Bon Iver as well. I've always really loved the folkier side and the more playing the instrument rather than just listening to a backing track and singing over that, which is still fun, but it just feels more like me to be able to write my music and to feel like I'm with an instrument and like I'm creating something really beautiful. For a while there, it was easier to sing on stage without a band and just prance around the stage, there's a lot of technical things with bringing instruments on tour and all that stuff so logistically it worked out easier not to. But I lost myself through that process of not being able to have a guitar on stage and not be able to have my piano with me and it stunted my songwriting, it stunted why I started music, it stunted my growth. It wasn't until COVID that I realised I was missing that so much and I didn't feel like myself anymore. I knew the only way that I could feel like myself as an artist again was picking back up my guitar and playing piano again and just being vulnerable again, and not just wanting to write an easy pop song for streaming.

I was gonna say because the last time we spoke you had just released the delicious electropop ‘Body Language’. which which was a shift, and it was a great shift because it was still very much you. Human beings, that's what we do we shift, we chase ideas, we go back on things.
We’re meant to change, we’re meant to evolve

Exactly! But of course, the more public you are, the more people have an adverse reaction to that, there's a lot of freedom in obscurity, shall I say. How have you found that pressure to stay relevant with your listeners while still being true to your own curiosities?
This is something that I've struggled with from the beginning because I started GRAACE when I had released a song with Hayden James called ‘Numb’, which I wrote, and when you strip that song back, those lyrics are so sad and so me, obviously, I wrote them all. But with the success of that song, especially in Australia, I didn't expect it to go so well. At that point, Hayden James had only just started releasing, so it was a big jump for me to not have a career at all in music and then suddenly, this song’s popped off, and I'm like, ‘Oh, do people only like it because it's electronic?’ At that point, I didn't really care and I released Self Sabotage, which is probably the most honest work that I've ever released. But I got into my own head thinking, ‘maybe I should do things like ‘Numb’.’ I released one poppier song ‘Kissing Boys’ that went well I and thought that’s what people want, digestible music, that doesn't really feel like me, but is fun to write. I feel like Self Sabotage was so depressing that I wanted to try to grow out of that. I thought that I was writing and releasing happier music, but that wasn't the case. Growing as an artist is writing about different things, not only writing about love and writing about things that still felt really like home to me. So I feel like I'm finally back in my body.

There's something so incredible about the full circle, but the full circle with a different perspective.
I keep saying to all my friends I feel like I'm 17 again, I have a love for music again. I definitely lost that and you could tell and that's why it wasn't translating. I wasn't really loving what I was releasing, I wasn't loving what I was writing. I was just chucked in rooms with random people that I didn't know, and I thought that's what I was supposed to do. But now I feel I'm finally surrounded by a really safe community where I can be vulnerable in a safe way, where it doesn't feel like I have to put on an act at all.

Last time we spoke we discussed how all your songs really do come out like…honestly, it's like we're eavesdropping into your conscience. And because of that, you have such an intense connection to your listeners, when they contact you you said that was one of your favourite things.
It's one of my favourite things ever. I'm by no means educated on that, but it's really beautiful that they feel comfortable to be able to confide in me about really personal things. I never had that growing up, I felt very isolated from the people that I was with in my life and didn't think that I could talk about any of that real stuff. This new generation is really really awesome with that, just shining a bigger spotlight on mental health and it just feels safe.

Oh they are so much better and smarter. They really are!
So much smarter. Oh my god. My mother was born in 1956, so she didn't have any of that going on. She was taught to be strong, suck it up, which I was kind of taught from a young age as well, but now you know, I go to therapy, I take care of my mental health as much as I would my physical health. It's the exact same thing, if not even more important.

I think there's a lot fewer children crying inside these days.
Yes, now people are crying online, which is great. I do it all the time!

So much better. On that note of youth I love the lead single of this latest body of work ‘Sentimental’. You just said that you used to write the sad love songs from Self Sabotage, and I feel like ;Sentimental’ is this beautiful reminiscence of ‘Spoken Word’ from that EP.
Oh my gosh, I still can't believe that I released that song. Holy shit!

It's so good, but so exposed. With ‘Sentimental’ from a listeners perspective it's like you're looking at that person, but you're going ‘do you know what? That was cool too, you were totally a human being then and you're sweet and I love you and it's a love letter for you’.
Yeah, I love it. At the time that I was writing it as well, I didn't particularly know who I was writing about, who I was writing to. It wasn't until I really listened to the lyrics, I was going through a big transitional part in the beginning of the year, music and management and all that business stuff, and it all felt really overwhelming because I came into this industry when I was 19, very fresh. I was never prepped, I didn't have stage parents or anything so it all was a lot for a young, vulnerable person. I didn't know myself, you know. I was listening back to the lyrics and I just knew in that moment that the song was definitely a letter to me. It's so beautiful to be able to hold myself now and accept a lot of flaws that I had in my early 20s and accept that that's okay. I can grow you know, I don't have to be in a depressive episode my whole entire life and hold myself into this mental jail Accept my past, accept that I can change. It's really beautiful that we can change and we can evolve, and that's what humans are supposed to do. We're so malleable. Our brains are like little plastic wires that we can fix. I don't have to be in a depressive episode my whole entire fucking life. So, thank you therapy for teaching me that! Because otherwise, I don't know where I would be.

Do you feel sometimes like it's your role? Because you did all those sad songs you have to be the sad person?
Oh my gosh this is where that shift happened with writing more popular music. I had so many people messaging me every single day - ‘are you okay? Oh my gosh, don't release any more sad music it's so much’. I got in my head and people genuinely thought that I was so depressed. But music is just my outlet, I actually wasn't depressed at that time. It's funny because I find it more therapeutic to release sad songs than to release happy music. I've spent most of my life since I was probably about 14 being sad, I've spent the majority of my life being sad. It sounds kind of sad saying that, but it feels like home, it feels safe. I feel very comfortable in that state. Releasing sad music just feels more like me. And I'm okay with that because I'm able to help people then that don't have an outlet like music to release their emotions.

I think most music is sad music, it's just with a different beat and production on it. Like you mentioned before, when you break down any of the greatest dance tracks, it's usually about the most awful evening of someone's life.
Oh my gosh, I know I because I've made a conscious effort in this a new live band I’ve just started, we're going to debut next month. I really wanted ‘Numb’ to be part of the set but we're like, ‘hey, this doesn't match sonically. It makes no sense’. But when I think about, I wrote this song on piano. So now we've managed to take ‘Numb’ and play it with a cello and I'm playing piano and we've got electric guitar and all this stuff. It's gonna be very pulling a layer back for that song. A lot of people don't realise how sad the lyrics are because I play that song at big festivals with Hayden and everyone's fist pumping, like drunk as shit, and I’m thinking ‘hmm maybe just Genius those lyrics because they're a little bit intense!’

But we're all doing that now, you look back on songs that you sang along to the pub and you’re like ‘hold on, I think this song is about assault’.
Definitely yeah. There's so many songs like that recently.

GRAACE, I know you have a backlog of music coming out. Can you tell me what's next in the creative pipeline for you?
Coming back to Self Sabotage, I lost myself for a couple years with my music and wasn't really growing as an artist. And now I feel like I've made this beautiful group of songs that I just love so much, and I'm so proud of every single lyric. I'm so proud of the production and people that I worked with. I called the EP Self Preservation because the only way that I was able to get through, especially COVID, was just accepting myself and being able to grow and accept that I can move on. I can become a better artist and I can force myself to do that and not feel like I need to hold myself down. That's a beautiful little bow tie to that Self Sabotage. A little ode to that and I'm excited to release that and then move on to just releasing music that I want to release, with just me and a guitar and real vulnerable sad shit. If people like it, they like it, if they don't I don’t really care because I like it.

‘Half Awake’ is out now via Sony Music Australia. You can stream here.

To keep up with all things GRAACE, you can follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Listen to our podcast with GRAACE here.

Read our four page feature on GRAACE in issue 9 of Women In Pop magazine