Gracie Abrams puts her heart in the line of fire on her latest single, “Close to You,” released seven years after she first teased it with a 20-second snippet on Instagram in 2017. The completed version of the record will appear on her forthcoming studio album, The Secret of Us, out June 21.
“After seven years of sitting with the ‘Close To You’ demo, it finally felt right to rework and include on this album,” Abrams shared in a statement. “I’m really grateful for the encouragement from everyone online who let me know they still want to hear song after all this time — it makes me want to dance with them, and I can’t wait till we get to do that.”
A few days before releasing “Close to You,” Abrams explained how it ended up on her second album when many fans were beginning to lose hope that they would ever receive it in its entirety. One audio for the unreleased version of the song has been used in more than 11,000 videos on TikTok, many of which were accompanied by captions pleading for it to be released.
“I wrote Close To You seven years ago and we made a demo that i posted 20 seconds of and you somehow cared about it enough for us to revisit the song seven years later,” she wrote on Instagram. “Close To You was not initially a part of TSOU — it’s from a different time entirely, we had finished the whole record top to bottom, but i heard you loud and clear. consider this one a bonus track pre-deluxe.”
Abrams produced “Close to You” with Sam de Jong, with whom she previously collaborated on “Stay” and “Minor.” In her post, she wrote, “Reuniting was so sweet! @itssamdejong, thank you for doing this with me!!! @electricladystudios, I love you forever, and I mean it.”
The Secret of Us follows the release of Abram’s debut album Good Riddance and was introduced with the lead single “Risk,” which was produced by the Nationals’ Aaron Dessner. “We had real, true fun writing this album,” Abrams shared when announcing the record. “There were also the occasional tears.”
Jack White Responds After Uproar Over Taylor Swift Songwriting Comment
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Jack White posted a statement on Instagram Monday evening after numerous publications took his comments in an interview with The Guardian out of context. When discussing poetry and songwriting, White mentioned fellow musician Taylor Swift‘s style of songwriting, and explored his own approach to storytelling when creating music. Unfortunately, online outlets framed his words as a critique of the Tortured Poets star, especially when it came to headlines that quickly circulated on the internet.
“Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just put this to bed,” wrote White in the since-deleted post. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together. What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing, was that I don’t find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry because I think that it could be repetitive for ME to always write about and It could be uninteresting for people who listen to my music to delve into, and that imaginary characters are more attractive to me as a writer.”
White went on to acknowledge the “tremendous success” of Swift and other songwriters who have their own process, while stating that just “because I say I have a way of doing things doesn’t mean that I think that EVERYONE should do it the same way.” He added, “They should do what works for them, And they do, and it is obviously appealing to many people, and I’m glad to hear that.”
When asked by The Guardian in the article published Sunday, if any of any of his songs were entirely autobiographical, White replied, “Not too much. Now it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don’t find interesting at all. I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself.”
White further explained, “Even if I’ve had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived that, I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song. If it’s something really painful, I’m not going to put this important, painful thing that I went through out there for some idiot on the internet to stomp all over. So I put a percentage of that into what I do and then morph it into somebody else’s character. I can’t really learn about myself until I put it into somebody else’s shoes.”
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In his Monday statement, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee said that at times he has been “made less and less interested in doing interviews” amid the “age of this massive demand for click bait and content.” Any “scrape of anything interesting” can be used as drama and “spit out as bait,” he continued, leading White to “not want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection as I’m too busy having to worry about accidentally triggering nonsense like this from so called ‘journalists’ and ‘editors.'”
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He ended his response to the wave of backlash following his interview by saying, “This has always been a problem as it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and imagination and pushes all of us to not share anything interesting, which was one of the points I made about keeping private things private in that same interview. But yeah, content.”
ADVERTISEMENTWhite recently released Jack White: Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1, a collection of lyrics from the artist’s solo recordings including No Name, The Raconteurs, and more, plus selected poems and writings by White, and essays by poet Adrian Matejka.