Crooners come and crooners go, but very few have the staying power to stick around. Now familiarise yourself with Isaac Gracie. Whether it be his unassuming demeanour or the delicate honesty running through his musicality, this singer could very well be one of the ones who goes the distance.
Listen to any of Gracie’s tracks and it doesn’t take a second to work out he’s an artist that wears his heart on his sleeve. He isn’t awash with brash and ballsy confidence like so many musicians I sit down with these days, and that’s refreshing. Unlikely to fall victim to the music industry machine any time soon, it’s hard to pinpoint the line between create endeavour and unavoidable duty with Gracie’s songwriting. He speaks of the burden he feels present with his craft and the pressure to get things right with a more self-critical outlook than most, presumably a somewhat frustrating personality trait to his fans that are responsible for many sold out dates on the singer’s upcoming UK tour, however you can't ignore that his modesty is also endearing in equal measures…
I’m going to start with a really cliche question, what are you most ‘Terrified’ of?
That is cliche, well done. That is very good, you hit the nail on the head there [laughs]. I don’t know, are we talking on an emotional level? Or an arachnophobia kind of thing? Because I don’t like spiders but I'm probably more afraid of death [laughs], so on a spectrum I don’t know where they rank. Death is probably at the top. Let’s just stick with that, being afraid of dying.
That song has been kicking around for a little bit now, how many more songs do you have ready to unleash?
I guess a fair bit, I’ve got an album coming out in late March/April kind of time and that will have some more new songs on it and then I’ve got enough material already, I think, to put out a second album and stuff, it just needs to be recorded at this point. That’s quite nice, this album has been so long in the can that the prospect of bringing out new music afterwards is truly exciting. The EP that I put out prior to ‘Terrified’ was all music that I had written in the last six months and that’s such a lovely feeling to write something and then put it out, it’s what music’s about. My happiest times were when I could just write a song and whack it on SoundCloud, that’s what it’s there for, just do it and get it out. Gestating with these things for too long you can forget the reason behind the song itself and you lose yourself in it. So in answer to your question, yeah I have quite a few.
Is it a constant thing for you, are you always making music?
Yeah fairly constantly, but it’s like if you don’t talk to a friend for a while you become very conscious of lack of communication and then you start feeling guilty about it and you start judging yourself for it in some ways because then you start being really hypercritical. It’s a similar relation with me and writing songs I guess. Generally if I have time to myself I will try and spend it writing music and whenever I don’t have the time to do that then I build up a bit of an inner dialogue that turns on me a little bit and therefore I always have to return to it. It’s kind of like a ball and chain situation I guess, it’s always there somewhere looming.
Do you feel like it can be a burden sometimes?
Yes absolutely, it’s only a burden [laughs]. Mate honestly it really is, there’s very little pleasure in it unless you’ve done something good, especially when you’re in a mindset that is quite self-defeating, which is most of the time. It’s quite hard to appreciate the things that you’ve done as maybe worthwhile because if you’re quite out of touch with yourself emotionally then of course the stuff you create feels out of touch with you emotionally and you can’t really view it for what it is. Sometimes a while afterwards you actually appreciate the worth of something that you’ve made and therefore a lot of the actual thing of being responsible for writing becomes a suffering and thats just what it is. It is a burden but it’s not without it’s pleasantries I guess.
Going back to ‘Terrified’ slightly, the video was filmed in Kosovo, did you get a chance to explore while you were there?
A little bit, not altogether too much though. Actually what am I saying, no we didn’t [laughs]. I saw Kosovo through the eyes of someone walking down the street from their hotel to the set, but it was cool, it was nice. We went for dinner on the first night, there was a power cut, it was an interesting culture, it was quite unlike anywhere I’d been before in that way. It was interesting, the people were lovely, everyone worked really hard to make the video the best it could be and we had a very short space of time to record it, so that required a lot of effort. All in all it was a lovely experience even though it was really tiring.
It’s a great video.
Oh man, I'm never really too sure about the videos that we make because I love making things and acting as a part of that, but when you get the end result you’re always left feeling a bit like, ‘Oh I could have done this,’ but I'm glad you like it.
People can write hundreds of songs, but it only takes one great song to change your life, would you say this is the case for you and ‘Last Words’?
Yeah, absolutely. But at the same time if you’re writing songs to change your life at that point in time then you’re probably going to never write the song that changes your life, maybe in a way? I don’t know, obviously that’s not true but at least for me I definitely didn’t regard it as being in that way. It was almost as if life decided that my life was changed and so I wasn’t in any way looking for the version of a changed life that ended up happening from that song. So the hundreds of songs that I might have written weren’t in the vain of what ‘Last Words’ eventually achieved and I think that that’s almost the best place that you can write songs because things weren’t necessarily there to be this big galvanising thing, it’s there to be whatever they are, but it’s true, what you said was true.
Has your music making process changed since then?
Yeah, I’ve just become way more neurotic about the whole thing, like absolutely. When you said ‘is it a burden?” It used to be this burden but this burden that at least made me feel kind of cool about myself because at least I was like, ‘I care about writing songs, that’s kind of cool, I do this on the side, no one really knows about it, at least it matters to me’ and now it’s just this awful, thing, it’s very hard to please and especially not being able to put it out, it means you just have to live with it and live in a close proximity to the failure of it because its quite hard for these things to be a success and therefore the writing process just becomes this real struggle. It’s still fun though, I guess I’ll go home and write a song about this and it will suck and I’ll hate myself.
Do you write with other people at all?
No it’s pretty much just me. I’ve done a bit in the past, when I got into the music industry I didn’t know anything about co-writing and I did a couple of co-writes, we wrote some decent songs but for me in terms of the actual thing of writing music, it’s predominantly a thing I do on my own, I do for myself. I respect the people who do co-write and I respect the art of co-writing, I respect what can be achieved in that arena but for me it’s more about writing shit songs on my own [laughs].
Do you use it as an outlet to say things that you maybe wouldn’t say in conversation?
Yeah I guess so, but not really actively. I write generally about my emotions but I’d like to think with the people that I write about my emotions towards I’m quite open about my emotions towards anyway, so there’s not a lot of secrecy, there’s not a lot of hiding in that regard where therefore I uncover myself in the songs. I guess it definitely is an outlet, and always has been, to convey that in a musical way and a lyrical way, in a way to make it something perhaps beautiful or perhaps cathartic.
With Village Underground selling out in advance…
Hell yeah baby!
That must be exciting.
It’s alright [laughs].
Can you pinpoint a moment when you feel like you made a significant breakthrough?
No, it all sucks. I think I could get a Grammy and someone would ask me that and I’d just be like, ‘meh, what, oh?’ I don’t know man because everything just feels like you go along the road with it and at some points people will say that something good has happened and you’re like, ‘yeah alright cool, that’s nice,’ but all these other things are giving me grief and shit to worry about. Nothing ever really jumps out as being a breakthrough, and I’m hoping that the moment I, touch wood, make some sort of breakthrough I’ll know that I’ve made a breakthrough. I don’t think that’s happened yet, and so I’m kind of holding out for that to still happen. Obviously when ‘Last Words’ came out, that was a breakthrough but that was like being chucked into a whole different universe, there was no breaking through it was just like I teleported into another place and all of a sudden I was there.
What’s the best bit of advice you’ve been given?
My management, ever since I changed my management, they’ve really inspired and encouraged me to pursue my own voice in terms of following what appeals to me and what I want to do personally and not giving into that idea, and that’s important. My mum is an influence who has always done a similar thing. In terms of actual advice there hasn’t really been anything, no quote or something that has stuck out.
You played the Torch Songs street party in support of men’s mental health the other day, how was that?
It was cool, it was for a good cause and mental health awareness is quite high up on my list of things that I give a shit about and things that I think other people should give a shit about, especially in young men. To be affiliated with that and to be able to draw attention to that is good. For me in my music and for me in my life I’ve never felt a person who could galvanise any sort of awareness or consciousness towards a good cause so it’s quite strange to be in a position where that might be affiliated to me in any way and that’s cool. For me it made me want to do more of it I guess. I think you learn these things, growing up with not a lot of money or not a lot of anything, so not a lot of personal feeling of power of my ability to make a change and therefore I think once you get a taste for it then maybe it encourages you to do it a bit more and that’s what it did for me.
Lastly, are you conscious of what the press write about you?
Yeah, but at the same time when you’re at this stage in your career I think it’s quite difficult to receive negative press. From my perspective it just seems like the music world is actually really supportive and encouraging of people who are up and coming, it’s only when you really crest the wave that people try and tear you down. I do read my own press and I am conscious of it, it might suck if a comment on whatever isn’t altogether too happy and that does affect me, but I don’t think I’m at a point where I can really have an opinion on that because if I thought it was affecting me now then Lord knows how it would affect me if I was actually in the position of someone who has to deal with things coming from all sides, I’m still quite unknown in many respects.
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Words: Shannon Cotton
Photo: PJP photos/REX/Shutterstock
