Q&A: Gratia Put Everything Out on the Table in Debut Single “Waiting, Wishing (Hurt Now)”
WRITTEN BY ANTHONY RATCHKOV
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Photo by Lauren Kimber
For multiple years Grace Galvin had been working behind the scenes in the Melbourne music sphere. However, Gratia is turning the spotlight over to her with the release of her debut single “Waiting, Wishing (Hurt Now).” It’s the perfect first song for many reasons, one of them being how the sonics and dynamic of this tune reflect her arc in becoming an artist herself. From the slow, atmospheric, floating sound, the tune opens up to and builds toward the energizing gang vocals towards the end. This debut single is Gratia’s proud arrival statement as a singer-songwriter rising from previously being a person working in the background.
The Melbourne-based artist harvested the lyrical energy from her own favorite in making “Waiting, Wishing (Hurt Now),” a journey for audiences to stand up and dance through blurry moments of anxiety. It’s the structure Gratia’s rising fanbase will enjoy hearing more of as her discography expands, and the type of sound her audience will develop an undying love for.
Despite all of this, the best part about Gratia’s fresh entrance to music extends beyond lyrics and sound. For those listeners obsessed with finding an artist that they can not only watch personally grow from the side but grow alongside, Gratia is your perfect choice.
Life on Jupiter had the chance to sit down with Gratia to receive a detailed insight on her debut single, her creative process and everything in between. Read our full conversation below.
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LIFE ON JUPITER: Prior to this release you’d been working behind the scenes in music, how big of an accomplishment does the first release of your own music feel?
GRATIA: It feels surreal, it feels like an astronomical accomplishment for me because this was not on my bingo card at all. Working behind the scenes in the industry for about five years now I would always wish I could be the artist, like it was the one thing I can’t do. It feels crazy, it still doesn’t feel real.
If your future discography is a tree, how does "Waiting, Wishing (Hurt Now)” serve as the seed for this tree to grow out of?
GRATIA: That’s a good question. I feel like this song particularly covers a lot of bases that I want to cover in the future with my music, like the slow intro in the song and the cinematicness of it as well as the upbeat and lighthearted sparkly textures later on in the song. We just kind of threw everything that I wanted in a song into one song, and I think that’s very telling of where I want my discography and my sonic world to go. In the future, the songs will be a bit more honed in on each specific element of those things.
Could you explain further why you described the thesis statement for your artist name as “a girl who carries the weight of the world on your shoulders?
GRATIA: The way my artist name came about is my first name is Grace and my middle name is Christiana and at first I just threw them together and came up with Gratia, not knowing what it meant. I Googled it just to check if it meant anything and then serendipitously when I read the definition I thought it was awesome. I also wanted to have a statement that wasn’t a dictionary definition of the word or my name. “A girl who carries the weight of the world on her shoulders” is very true to me and the way that I feel things; the way I carry around my feelings as if they’re heavy and I feel things quite deeply. It was just really important to me to not only have the technical definition of the name, but also something that's a safe place for people who also experience that feeling.
You’ve mentioned artists like Gracie Abrams and Lizzy McAlpine being inspirations, outside of your sound and music in general, how do your favorite artists inspire you in other ways?
GRATIA: Gracie Abrams has particularly inspired me when it comes to my fear of singing through the ways she carries herself through her nerves and her anxiety as a person. There are a few interviews that she’s done from the promo for Daughter from Hell where she’s talked about the way she has kind of felt ostracized in social situations or that she doesn’t really know how to show up as like a normal person and kind of carries a lot of anxiety. Seeing her take on the world so graciously and the way she carries herself has really helped with my anxiety and feeling like this is something I can do. There’s so many things I could say about Lizzy McAlpine and anyone in that singer-songwriter pop world. The way they have such confidence in themselves is so inspiring beyond their sonic worlds, I really want to take a lot from the way they carry themselves through conversation.
A lot of artists talk about how finishing a song can be a tedious process because you’re listening to parts of the song over and over again, do you find that you have a whole new capacity to listen to “Waiting, Wishing (Hurt Now)” a hundred times now that it is finished and released?
GRATIA: Yeah, definitely. I love this song with all my heart and I’m very proud of it. I wrote the intro first at home by myself and then took that into the studio to make the rest of the song. It came together in the studio so quickly that there actually weren't any points where we were being tedious about it. We made decisions really fast because this was never meant to be the first song that came out, it was kind of just made sporadically and for the heck of it. Every decision was like, oh, this song isn’t even coming out, like it doesn’t matter. What’s the most fun we can have? How can we put everything in this song? So it actually wasn’t tedious.
On your Instagram, you mentioned having a document titled “musings” when you write down all your loose, sporadic creative thoughts to see if they become lyrics. Would you say that’s more like organized chaos or is there a structure to when and how you write down these lines?
GRATIA: I started with a structure. I put it all in a Google Doc, and I used to put dates on everything and organize them into categories, but now it’s just one giant Google Doc that has like 40 pages. Anytime I have a thought I open the doc and just throw it on there straightaway. Sometimes I have to ask myself when I wrote something because I have no idea. My creative process happens quite frequently at night, and sometimes I’ll be half asleep and then have a thought, write it down, go back to sleep. I look back at them and some make no sense, but I think it’s fun to pull out things from them when you get into the studio. Sometimes I find that separate entries actually correlate and turn into the same song.
You took the cover art photo for Sammi Heany’s recent debut single “Guilty”, have you guys been taking inspiration from and supporting each other as you’re both releasing your first songs at the same time?
GRATIA: It’s funny you bring her up because she and I wrote a first version of this song in the studio that was like a sad folk song. It had completely different lyrics except for the chorus. We wrote that chorus before I wrote the intro of this version and it’s obviously about the same situation and it is essentially the sad perspective of it, the sad perspective of rejection or unrequited love. I took it home and I loved the song very dearly but decided that now that I’ve processed it through writing that song, that’s not how I feel about the situation anymore. That’s when the intro came to me. Sammi and I only recently met maybe six months ago before she put out her song to take those photos and now she is one of my best friends and she’s such an inspiration because her artistry is just incredible. Her ability to write is unmatched. I’m so excited for the things she’s going to do.
This song is part of an upcoming debut EP, what else can your growing fanbase expect from you next?
GRATIA: The songs are still developing day by day, but what people can expect is sort of the same thing that happened with this song where I feel as though I’m taking stereotypically negative feelings and feelings that can make you feel sad, down, or a bit more anxious and nervous and alchemizing them into a song that allows you to feel them, but then it let it go. I found while writing the EP that when I went into the studio to my producer, JT, I said it was going to be the saddest EP ever. It’s all very introspective and the topics are all around mental health. The way I was writing them at home just on my piano, they obviously sounded really sad. As the days have gone by in the studio, we find ourselves adding a drumbeat and suddenly we’re dancing. We realized these songs are actually meant to be ones that can hold your hand through these bad experiences and sort of be songs that make you feel better.
