This Is What It Feels Like

• Spanish Translation

I genuinely love it so much. I feel like I took lots of months of feeling unable to write, and then just gotten very honest with myself. I’m relieved about this project because, when I wrote minor, it was definitely in the middle of a break-up, feeling like it was what I needed to write about, which was very true, and I felt weightlifted when I put out minor as well, but I feel like I had more patience with myself making this project, and got a lot more honest with myself about my relationship with me vs. my relationship with others. I feel like this project is more of a personal introduction than minor was. I hope people like it.

— Gracie via an interview with NMA.

I wanted to make a fuller album a while back, after we released minor, but minor was about a tumultuous relationship that had just ended, and I was really not in a great place mentally and emotionally for quite a while. So I didn’t feel like I could commit to the process enough to achieve what I wanted the full album to be.

The songs on This Is What It Feels Like very much came together in fragments, kind of scattered. I was recording it in Maine, and as I did it felt like I was getting back to myself artistically. I wanted to immortalize this fever dream moment in my young adult life. I’ve always romanticized the process of making an album, since I am such a genuine fan of music. And internally, the whole time, I felt like I was flailing, grasping at stuff, and trying to write words that made no sense at all. But I’m glad it’s all working out the way it is currently, because I don’t think I could have handled it last year. But I feel actually ready for it now.

– via V Magazine

Writing This Is What It Feels Like was a strange experience. I wasn’t doing too well during the pandemic, I was trying to write all the time and everything felt really fragmented. I felt like I was in this alternate universe. I sort of, constantly just felt like running away. I was spending a lot of time scrolling through my phone, just looking at old pictures, and feeling nostalgic for a time outside all of this. Lots of flashbacks to chaotic, but sort of perfect adventures with my best friend Audrey and adventures of New York City really inspired me.

Just the memory of those times reminded me of how full I felt at one point, and that got me to start writing again. Being able to make something tangible from all of this and seeing people relate to it has been kinda life changing. It’s been a bizzare process, but I’ve never felt luckier.

–via Office Magazine