Gracie Abrams, the year’s biggest pop star: ‘Trump has only been in office a month, and everybody is more at risk’ | Gracie Abrams

On a video call from a hotel room in Hamburg, Gracie Abrams is expounding on the virtues of decoupling yourself from social media and living a life offline. “You can literally do so much when you’re not scrolling!” she enthuses. “You can retain more information; everything gets lighter. You have a greater capacity to be more present, to be there for the people in your life, to read a book that’s going to inspire your next album, or go on a hike and breathe air instead of sitting in a dark room on fucking Instagram. I’m doing lots of, like, tactile stuff, staying off social media,” she adds. “Needlepoint and shit like that. I’m just trying to make things … to have some tangible evidence of having lived this year.”

Of course, this is nothing the world hasn’t heard before: we’re well used to being told about the benefits of a digital detox. Still, it feels like an intriguing statement coming from Gracie Abrams. For one thing, her single That’s So True spent most of January at No 1 in the UK: it spent most of November and December there as well, took a brief Christmas holiday, then reappeared to beat Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga et al once more. Her album The Secret of Us also reached No 1, and is now enjoying its 18th consecutive week in the Top 20, the kind of longevity only afforded to those artists who have broken through into the upper echelons of pop stardom.

It’s the same story back home in the US, where The Secret of Us has spent 35 weeks on the charts: her previous album managed two. Abrams is calling from Hamburg because it’s the latest stop on a global tour that’s been filling vast arenas for months and is scheduled to keep doing so until August. You see what she means about needlepoint, but you do wonder how much tangible evidence of having lived this year a person might need.

Even by latterday pop standards, her rise seems particularly bound up with social media. She first broke through in 2020, with I Miss You, I’m Sorry: a viral lockdown hit with its cheerfully amateurish, bedroom-bound video and lyrics that seemed to fit the prevalent mood (“Do you remember happy together? I do, don’t you?”). She already had a major label deal, but was initially famed for directly interacting with her audience online: responding to their comments on SoundCloud and Instagram, sending them DMs, referring to them not as her fans but her “friends” (“more friends than anyone has ever had ever!” she told an interviewer in 2021); becoming the first non-Korean artist to use Weverse, the K-pop platform designed to offer “a deeper level” of artist-fan interaction than that of traditional social media.

It’s a smart way to build a committed fanbase, and it played into a pervasive idea of Abrams as what one writer called “gen Z’s most unfiltered storyteller”: a singer-songwriter whose work was essentially private diary entries set to music, and who whispered her lyrics as if personally confiding in the listener.

But it’s clearly not an approach one can maintain after the kind of success garnered by The Secret of Us, an album noticeably brighter and less introverted than her previous work (the result, she says, of both “a crush that I had felt way more significantly than in previous years” and a new writing partnership with her best friend and roommate, Audrey Hobert). When you’re packing out the Alsterdorfer Sportshalle and Madison Square Garden, not everyone online wants to be your friend.

“It’s definitely not halted full stop,” she says. “There are moments where I do feel really thrilled to interact directly; whether it’s through a DM or a comment, I feel tapped into their lives still.” But, she says, it’s “less frequent, because, honestly, mentally I don’t benefit from engaging heavily in the way I used to. The way the algorithm works, if you spend five extra seconds reading a comment and there’s a keyword with your name in it, that’s what it starts to feed you. So I’d open my phone in the morning and there would be lots of unsolicited opinions that were starting to make me feel sore, and then I would notice myself carrying that feeling. But if you don’t engage with it, you don’t feel so sick.”

Being tapped into your audiences’ lives seems risky in an era when we hear a lot about toxic fandoms, when artists such as Chappell Roan feel compelled to call out fans for “creepy behaviour” and “harassment”.

“The very large majority of the time I have been lucky, my interactions with fans out in the world haven’t been ones that make me go ‘oh shit’,” she says. “But I’ve definitely had moments like that. I’m walking with my headphones in, or my back is turned, or my head is down and a stranger comes in with a hug before anything else … that’s really not a good feeling. As an animal, you’re just like, ‘Oh fuck, what’s that?’ Ninety per cent of the time it’s really sweet introductions, or no crossing any lines with physical touch. But if you experience it even once, your guard can go up, because it feels unnatural. You want to walk a fine line between being attuned to what your audience feels and letting your own conviction guide you.”

The occasional over-familiar fan aside, Abrams’ rise appears to have been remarkably smooth. Big names have flocked to work with her: The Secret of Us, like its predecessor Good Riddance, was made with the National’s Aaron Dessner, best-known as Taylor Swift’s chief latterday collaborator; Brian Eno unexpectedly cropped up on one track from Good Riddance. She has enjoyed a succession of profile-boosting celebrity co-signs. No sooner had I Miss You, I’m Sorry appeared than Olivia Rodrigo announced that her forthcoming single was inspired by it – the forthcoming single turned out to be themulti-bn streaming Drivers License – while Taylor Swift selected her as the support act on two sizeable chunks of the record-breaking Eras tour and appears as a guest and co-writer on The Secret of Us. Abrams recently posted a photo of herself embracing her idol, Joni Mitchell, who was apparently unfazed even when Abrams showed her a tattoo she has featuring Mitchell’s handwritten lyrics.

She has pulled off the enviable trick of establishing a fanbase who feel her songs confide her innermost secrets to them, while also drawing a veil over her private life, only ever discussing it publicly in the vaguest terms (she is presumed to be in a relationship with actor Paul Mescal, but has never confirmed it to the wider world). “Sharing versus not sharing,” she nods. “I’m lucky to have this avenue, where, in my songs, I talk very openly about how I feel. It’s like when I’m writing, I’m talking to myself. Talking to strangers, there are naturally things you hope to protect a bit more. Some things feel sacred.”

She seems smart, thoughtful and level-headed: at 25, she appears to be navigating the choppy waters of celebrity with admirable ease. This might have something to do with her background: her father is the Hollywood director/producer JJ Abrams. On the one hand, that means her success has played out to a constant background hum of sniping in which the phrase “nepo baby” figures heavily, but there are presumably worse preparations for fame than growing up in a celebrity-adjacent Hollywood family.

Quite the opposite, she says: she was so introverted as a teenager that she thought a “public-facing career” was out of the question. “I knew that it would involve performing, and that was the part that felt so horrifying to me. I wrote songs because it was easier than talking about my feelings. I wasn’t interested in anybody hearing me. I was so turned off by the idea of confronting people face-to-face. That was what I loved about sharing music online – you could hide behind a profile.”

As her major label courted her, she kept her fears hidden. “I remember signing my deal and feeling really nauseous about it.” So what changed? “Well, I see a therapist. And it hasn’t been some overnight thing. The first shows I ever played were over Zoom during the pandemic, so that was like a baby step versus truly facing my fear head-on. Then I played the tiniest rooms” – which, it should be noted, didn’t stop her “projectile vomiting” before going onstage – “so it’s almost like these tiny moments of exposure therapy.”

Clearly it worked: you don’t see much evidence of introversion in the fan videos of her onstage, belting out I Miss You, I’m Sorry from a set designed to look like the bedroom in which she recorded the song’s original video, or lecturing audiences in a pre-election US about the necessity of voting when “democracy is hanging by a thread”. She was an ardent Harris supporter, and performed at one of her campaign rallies in Wisconsin.

In the wake of the US election result, one theory that did the rounds was that the sheer wattage of celebrity endorsements Harris received was counterproductive – that they reinforced the notion that the Harris campaign was out of touch with ordinary voters’ concerns in a difficult economic climate. “I don’t think it was counterproductive,” Abrams frowns. “The issues were so much deeper, more systemic. How I feel about having played a tiny role in one of her many rallies that she crushed flawlessly every single time is that I’m proud to have been there and proud to have felt that energy in the room. That was so tangible and so real, and it’s something I’ve held on to since the results of the election.

“Trump has only been in office for a month and has already done everything in his power to make every marginalised community feel smaller, to make everybody more at risk, to overwhelm us with information, or disinformation, so that we feel powerless and hopeless. And what I felt at that rally in Wisconsin that day was the opposite of hopelessness: I felt real strength in gathering. That’s the antidote right now. Obviously, there’s got to be so much more we do when we gather in that way. But I feel really lucky to have witnessed in person what that kind of light feels like, especially now in the face of this quality of darkness. It’s unprecedented, it’s global.”

She was so crushed by Trump’s victory that she wondered about going on tour at all. “Right before going off, I was just like: how are we not all dedicating all of our time to fighting this … thing?” She decided that “if me, Gracie, in the position I’m in in this world – like the luckiest ever – is feeling this way, then everybody is feeling this fucking way. I can give people who are coming to these shows two hours to feel everything they’re feeling at an extreme, and be able to express it, or just distract themselves for two hours and recharge their battery. We’re going to have to work out how to do that every single day, not just for the next four years, because obviously the impact of the next four years is going to be long-lasting.”

She says she spent a week at Dessner’s studio before departing for Europe to work on new material, and found herself writing noticeably different kinds of songs than she expected. “I was just like: shit, I don’t even know how to articulate the degree to which I feel sick inside about everything. Most of those songs from that week are not about relationships. They’re about the fact that LA just burned down, about the fact that I don’t understand how we’re supposed to really carry on. Of course those subjects will show up, it’s life, but they’re … different themes than I anticipated.”

But then, as she points out, nothing has turned out like she expected. “After signing and starting to release music in a more real way, and after playing my first shows and realising I was wrong about how I felt about playing live because of the kindness of the people in the room, I started writing long letters to myself about dreams,” she says. “One of the things I wrote after my first show was ‘One day I want to open for Taylor Swift’. That was never going to happen, obviously. What’s been so lucky is that the goalposts keep kind of moving and my imagination has expanded and I feel excited about being out of my comfort zone.

“Being proved wrong about what was the scariest thing in the world to me at the time has made me really excited to be wrong about everything else.” She laughs, before heading off to another packed arena.