Gracie Abrams’ Hell Is Other People’s Expectations

Gracie Abrams, for most of her career, has lived inside labels. The LA-based singer-songwriter is a former Taylor Swift superfan and current Taylor Swift protegee. To her fans, she's a generational exemplar of "sad girl" pop; if you Google that, you'll find an impressively long Spotify playlist called "gracie abrams but it gets progressively sadder." And she is, as commenters perennially delight in pointing out, the daughter of storied showrunner J. J. Abrams.Most of those labels have never sat right. The Abrams thing is played out. If the Swift thing wasn't played out before, it certainly is now; Taylor has spiraled so far into such a solipsistic lyrical world (for better or worse) that very few people are doing what she's doing right now. And the "sad girl" thing was a description imposed on Abrams; it's not something she embraces or performs. She's more inclined to downplay and deflect: to describe, as she did during a giggly hangout with Olivia Rodrigo, the feeling of missing Audrey Hobert as a "cute loneliness." (Can you imagine Lana Del Rey speaking the words "cute loneliness"? Or Gracie Abrams writing the lyric "the blue of my oblivion"?)That Rodrigo interview is interesting...