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.” 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 was 17 when she penned “minor”—about a crush who lived too far away for her to visit before curfew—which became the title track of her 2020 debut EP. Abrams’ talent for sharing unfiltered emotional upheaval continued on her diaristic 2023 breakup album Good Riddance, co-written with and produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner. She reunited with Dessner for the following year’s The Secret of Us, which featured a guest turn from Abrams’ formative songwriting hero, Taylor Swift. Even more impactful on her career were the ready-made sing-along “I Love You, I’m Sorry” and the urgent splay of heartbroken lyrics driving “That’s So True”—a song included on the album’s deluxe edition, only to become her biggest hit yet. Taking those deeply personal songs on tour, Abrams learned just how important her open-hearted lyrics had become to so many people—as evidenced by fans joining in during her 2025 set at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, documented in full for an exclusive Apple Music Live set. As she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe after that tour: “I may have written the song that we’re all singing, but that song is no longer about me at all…The experience of watching people express themselves loudly amongst strangers is what makes me excited to do this again.”