I meet Grace Ives in the back corner of Brooklyn dessert shop The Chocolate Room. There’s a row of thick chocolate cakes on the counter that look like they’ve been snatched off the set of the movie Matilda, and the air is thick with the smell of them. It’s a spot that’s been around forever, and yet on the day we’re there, they’re filming a news broadcast about it. That’s how being with Grace Ives feels: everyday places, thoughts, and feelings suddenly and unstoppably, burble with new meaning.
Ives has a cotton candy cloud of curls and a sensitivity to the world that makes her music, which is incredibly specific and revealing of its creator, also instantly relatable. Where her debut album 2nd was sharp, its follow-up, Janky Star, was inquisitive, tempered in its curiosity by lush earworms like “Mansion” or “Nightmare.” Girlfriend pushes that sound further. Inspired by her recent journey to sobriety and co-produced with Ariel Rechtshaid and John DeBold, Ives’ voice is as clear and compelling as a heartbeat. The album’s gravitas is rounded out by soaring moments like in “Stupid Bitches.” Over hot chocolate and ginger cake, we chatted about the album, the “fake anxieties” of collaboration, and how sobriety shaped it.
Nicolaia Rips: ‘You’ve always been a super introspective songwriter, but it feels like your journey to sobriety is significant to this album specifically. Did the album start with that desire?
Grace Ives: When I started it, I wasn’t sober or thinking soberly at all. Working on it and then removing the numbness, wanting to be somewhere else mentally, helped me to get closer to a less made up version of myself. When you get sober it’s kind of like you’re a baby, and so you’re super open and vulnerable. I think that openness and willingness to cry on other people’s shoulders and accept help really helped me figure out what I’m talking about in these songs.
Are there other ways in which this album feels different to the records that came before it?
I have a band of support telling me this stuff is so good. It’s not just me having to believe in it all on my own. I feel like I have more people standing behind it and being proud of it with me. I’m more eager to share it with everybody.
Did you find it challenging to expose your creative process your collaborators?
In the past, I thought about collaboration as like somebody taking something away from you, or claiming it as theirs. That isn’t really what happens when you work with someone. This time it was more open, because I realised how fun it is. Group projects in school are bad preparation for working with people in real life, where it’s more of a true back and forth. [On Janky Star, Justin really helped me trim the fat, and put a bow on it. On this album, there were moments when John or Ariel told me“You should rethink the lyrics here,” which is horrifying and embarrassing, but it’s so helpful for me. Now I feel like I’ve been through vulnerability boot camp.
As an artist, as a young woman, you don’t want somebody imposing their vision.
Yeah, I’ve just had this fear that people will see that and be like, ‘Oh, she didn’t write it,’ but that’s like a fake anxiety.
You’ve said in the past you want people to listen to your music and cry. Your music can also be funny, you have this sense of humor that’s laced through it. Like calling a song “Stupid Bitches.”
I’ve been a jokey, funny person for my whole life. Growing up I was like: ‘Okay, I’m not pretty, I’m not skinny. I’m gonna be hilarious then.’ I think it’s always just colored how I think and have gotten through the harder moments—by seeing the joke in it. In the past I’ve tried to talk around something, or make it super flowery and vague. But I think that getting closer to this kind of bluntness I have is what allows for something to be called “Stupid Bitches.”
I hear you grew up in Brooklyn and, not to play New York high school geography, but you came up with a cohort of other musicians like Blu and Rex Detiger.
Grace Ives: She’s a true prodigy. Her and her brother Rex have been that good at their instruments since, I swear, 2007.
Growing up in New York, having access to the city and the music scene, is an extraordinary thing for young artists.
I’ve always been pretty introverted, I didn’t really go out until late in high school. But I was going to Shea Stadium [iconic NYC musical venue]. All those actually DIY places were fun to go to. It was a very crunchy time musically.
What kind of content have you been taking in as you’ve worked?
Not to be a cliched sad woman, but I read The Bell Jar for the first time. Hearing Sylvia Plath describe her own darkness and her own silence so beautifully was really inspiring in a trippy, scary way for the music. I went through a really depressing book phase. My therapist told me to stop, because it really was making me so blue. Dark blue, navy blue. But that was helpful in seeing the different ways you can say: “I don’t feel so good.”