Song Review: “I Love You, I’m Sorry” by Gracie Abrams
In the rosy midsummer of 2024, dreamy and glitzy with midwestern princess Chappell Roan’s singles, U.K. club-kid queen Charli XCX’s brat album, and anticipation of Malibu beach babe Sabrina Carpenter’s Short’ n’ Sweet, darling-romantic songwriter Gracie Abrams’ The Secret of Us has won the hearts and inspired the pens of delicate and nostalgic lover girls. Delicate and starry-eyed, these girls and young women – myself proudly counted among them – are knocked down by the darkness of real life and long to discover true love and the meaning of life – twin projects that Gracie has pursued as long as she has been writing and producing music. Notebooks and acoustic guitars and online sharing platforms have granted the twenty-four-year-old singer-songwriter a paradise to process what she has been through and what she is dealing with, and to communicate and to share with poetry-thinking and -writing listeners, since she was a teenager.
Revealing secrets with an exhale and chasing catharsis, accepting the dirtiness and messiness of trying to find oneself, reach out to and connect with a potential love, and recover from a first heartache atop delicate and wavering acoustics, Joni Mitchell- and Georgian peach-like guitars, and raw, brown sugar digital-app production, Gracie first composed through.
In the early tumultuous days of the pandemic, when locked doors and no face-to-face time caused past memories and regrets to run free, an early song written for Gracie’s first longer project, “I miss you, I’m sorry,” wistful and sombre, reflecting in sullen piano keys, harmonious minor acoustic strums, and softly breaking singing, listened to and cried with listeners on Tiktok. With its contemplating on love’s becoming lost and acceptance of nostalgic memories and wishes to start again, and officially released, after the singer-songwriter’s signing to hands-on and caring Interscope. In between 2020’s “Minor” and 2021’s “Feels Like,” Abrams deepened and richened reflective, childhood acoustic guitar strings, dark-emerald-fern piano melodies, and plaintive June-and-Johnny Cash snare drums. Over this time Abrams raises the carefulness and intimacy of these instruments to reflect the brown butter-warm memories of childhood friends – especially those that have been lost and that hurt us in our earliest poet-years – the harmony between cathartic sadness and hopefulness, the young singer-songwriter is natural with. Only instrumental passages and minutes for pause work alongside echoes of harps to capture growing pains (especially as girls feel them).
Growing up, discovering a young woman’s true values and beliefs, is the driving force behind Gracie’s first album, Good Riddance. The album, winning the twenty-three-year-old songwriter a New Artist Grammy nomination, witnesses Abrams’ exhibiting more confidence in her delicate hand: her gentleness with understanding life experiences, finding the softness in difficult times, and placing distance between herself and big, world-changing events. Gracie recorded the album at The National songwriter and Taylor Swift’s folklore / evermore collaborator Aaron Dessner’s Long Pond studio. The producer and learned songwriter’s caring for his artist’s emotional truths and guidance towards purging through song the things that are weighing heavy, encouraged Gracie to pen the darker sides of her walk through the crazy, unpredictable landscape that life throws at one.
The album’s title Good Riddance honours a final ending to the relationships and issues that wound our cores, and the wish to grant kindness one last time to those that we will never see again. Acoustic guitar swells and deeply exhales on the track which Gracie begins such an album with, (“Good riddance” strings the poetic coda on) “Best.” Trying to reckon with the ways that you wounded your first ‘til-death-do-you-part romance, the singer-songwriter’s fine-lace singing intimates; quietly rippling piano keys, snare drums, and harmonies demonstrating Abrams’ confidence in being musically ambitious and heavenly-matched with Good Riddance’s producer. The weight of study, and layered, building harmonies enwrap this first album’s first single. Gracie’s first album’s introduction’s few, graceful bones reach across the album – shining on “Amelie,” putting into words the petal-delicacy of understanding and navigating a poet-young woman’s love for a female muse. “I met a girl once / She sorta ripped me open / She doesn’t even know it / She doesn’t know my name,” she sings, a sweetest lullaby.
Processing how one with a poetic soul hurts the ones whom they care for at the turning of adolescence to one’s twenties occupies Abrams’ lyrics, while the music itself captures the mania of a heart breaking as that first ‘til-death-do us-part love ends. Tension between accepting an end and wanting to strike a beloved to keep them near is walked all of the way through on “Will you cry?” Stumbling bass notes, anxious, shaking drums in the choruses and echoey vocal harmonies accompany this braving. Abrams touches upon the perils of touring as somebody with a foundational connection to one’s home and family, and that needs a sense of home on “Right Now,” writing, “I feel homesick / Want my dog in the door / And the light in the kitchen from the fridge on the floor.” Dreamy piano keys and suspended flutes hint at hope; a balancing of the happy and the sad that she works further on, on this summer’s The Secret Of Us.
Leading the charge as this sophomore record’s official leading single is “I Love You, I’m Sorry,” a re-interpretation of the singer-songwriter’s 2020 breakthrough hit from an older and more grown Gracie. Returning to collaborator Aaron Dessner and his Long Pond studio, and creatively ignited by the richly diverse women-lead pop landscape of 2023-24, Secret’s tracks sees an Abrams approaching the heavy themes in her life with playfulness and self-acceptance. Speaking on her earlier album, Gracie has made sense of her life and emotions by unfurling them in her notebook before sharing her feelings with anybody else since she was a child, and on Secret, the singer-songwriter intertwines silliness and imagination into her cathartic process.
Playing a role in Secret’s songwriting and the tour that will accompany the album’s release is Gracie’s friendship and touring with her childhood hero, Taylor Swift, who seeks to touch every one of her fans with her music and creates and protects a tight-knit and healing community amongst her fans. The choice to re-fashion her fans’ beloved “I miss you, I’m sorry” and beginning this sophomore album with this song extends arms and embraces her fan base; a music video running around the artist’s coastal southern California hometown and laughing with her childhood besties bringing these loyal, deeply-feeling fans into Gracie’s tight-knit chosen family. Along with reaching out and grabbing Gracie’s listeners, the harmony found between playfulness and realizing how the singer-songwriter has thusly hurt the ones that she has loved on Secret’s tracks manifests in this first, true single’s music video, with Gracie accepting an award for “Asshole of the Year.”
Abrams, happily, fearlessly leaping into the crowd at this ceremony, and crowd-surfing in the belly of the beast, represents the twenty-four-year-old’s not just acceptance of, but apologizing for the wounds that she has inflicted in her past. Warm sunshine touches every spot of this visual to freeze the California-born’s memory of home; a dreamy shimmer likewise coating each element in “I Love You, I’m Sorry’s” music video hinting at Abrams’ optimism for closure and dual happinesses after all is said and done.
The single rises and floats as Abrams and her besties do across their hometown – the singer-songwriter’s lyrics apologizing for her side in the downfall of one of the relationships at subject on The Secret of Us contrasting with this, as though the music video is how Gracie has healed, or is healing from the events that she sings about.
Abrams’ favourite lyric on this record comes from the single’s second verse, the wistful and honest “And I’ll have a drink / Wistfully lean out my window / And watch the sun set on the lake / I might not feel real / But it’s okay;” a turning point that sews together a rightfully nailing first verse and a sweeping revelatory bridge. This hopeful and unpacking passage is both dreamy and realistic – a balance that guides the lyrics and music alike. On the track Gracie narrates – with a helping hand from best friend and writing partner Audrey Hobert – her ex-partner’s paying his ‘friends’ so as to protect his perspective and ego never being challenged; how this partner left Gracie behind once she made him re-think the way he went about the world. On the second verse, Abrams grapples with moving on: getting over the phantom pain of the highs being in the past, and pulling oneself out of the valleys, learning how to take accountability for the ones that one had caused.
The bridge; a densely emotional and poetic section that Gracie chooses to close out the single with; voices all of the things that she had never said to this partner, vulnerable with no care for consequences. A purging, of fears for what will come and familiar patterns Abrams is wishing to break.
Abrams and Dessner’s instruments swell as she breathes the titular, “I love you, I’m sorry” (a vocal delivery that oscillates between regretful and optimistic). The yearning summer feeling encased within the lyrics reflects in the hopeful sounds – a sunny, ripe clementine acoustic guitar drives the song along, a romantic 1950s tambourine joining on the second verse, and bursting bluebell-cymbals and -snares making their mark on the bridge. Strings like pond ripples and soaring vocal harmonies spool a feeling of tragedy.
Paying tribute to idol Taylor Swift’s resounding yet intimate “All Too Well (10 Minute Version);” the messy, wounding unpacking of a very significant relationship, for those that do not know; the bridge fastens, exploding, in reflection of the lyrical outpouring, shouty harmonies layering upon Gracie’s main vocal delivery. From music to lyrics, Secret’s official first single continues what Gracie Abrams first charted on her first album, while looking to new horizons process-wise. Self-growth, the singer-songwriter knows how to do.
