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Grace Pettis - Her Most Personal Album Yet |
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Singer / Songwriters usually prefer enough ambiguity with their lyrics
that the listener has a lot of latitude in terms of interpreting the
meaning, but with the new album Down To The Letter, Grace Pettis makes
it clear that this a deeply personal collection of songs.
Talking about the song, “I Take Care Of Me Now,” she says,
“It is completely autobiographical. It is one of those first
songs that I wrote after I left my marriage of eleven years and a
relationship of fourteen years. It was something I really didn’t believe
yet, because I had been in that relationship since I was a teenager and
I couldn’t really conceive of what it would be like to take care of
myself and be alone in the world, because I had been part of a couple
for so long. I remembered thinking that I was going to be okay, and I
could put myself first and take care of myself. I wrote it as a mantra
that I could grow into.
It was like when you are a kid, and your parents buy shoes that are a
little too big for you and you grow into them. It is a song that I wrote
for myself. It is my anti-codependency (song).
The words are emotive and at times poignant, “I take care of me now /
Since I made up my mind / I’m gonna be just fine / Every day gets better
and / I got bruises, but the good news is / I take care of me now…” They
are words that describe the scars that may still remain from a
relationship that has ended, but learning to love yourself, which is of
more importance.
Grace Pettis elaborates, “You don’t come out of something like that
unscathed. Where there has been love and betrayal there are going to be
scars. I don’t need to make them go away for me to love myself. In fact,
they are a part of what helped me to become the person who I am. I think
it is acceptance of your own story and learning to fully embrace the
person that you are.”
“I wrote “Rain,” in November of 2021 and it was maybe a week into having
packed up a couple of suitcases and going to Ireland to move in with my
mom, because I was ending my marriage. I went with a really good friend
of mine Natalie, who is also a singer and songwriter. We were in
Nashville, a night or two before the flight. We had dinner with a really
nice guy, a friend of hers and he is kind of a big deal in the
publishing industry. He was really helpful and sweet. He bought us
dinner and gave us a lot of great tips and advice on how to write
commercially successful music.
One of the pieces of advice was there are a lot of commercially
successful songs with the word sunshine in them, so maybe try to write a
song with the word sunshine in it. It is a fun challenge and normally I
would be down for something like that. I really tried, but it was the
week that I was leaving the country, to be separated and put an ocean
between me and my marriage. It was a really hard time for me. Then we
went to my mom’s house, and we were in a country where it rains every
day. There was very little daylight, and I was trying to write a song
about sunshine. It wasn’t the right context.
Natalie ended up writing a song that fit the requirements, but I wrote
“Rain,” instead. I wrote a couple of extra verses and then whittled it
down,” she recalls.
We wondered if Grace Pettis has Irish roots.
“Yes and no. I have a lot of Scottish ancestors on my dad’s side and
possibly some Irish ancestors on my dad’s side. There is a lot of
English ancestry on my mom’s side. I grew up going there (Ireland) as a
kid. I ended up going there for a year when I was twelve. My mom would
periodically move there for a year or two at a time for sabbaticals. She
teaches Irish literature and poetry. She is an Irish poetry and
literature scholar. She grew up going there as a kid, because my
grandfather did the same thing when she was a kid. Our family sort of
has roots there and ties there, but we are not from there. My mother is
in fact, an Irish citizen now. In fact, my stepdad is too.
I was in a town called Parteen. It is right over the bridge in County
Clare (near the River Shannon). It is a really pretty place.
It was outside of Limerick enough that you were in the country,
but close enough that you could walk to the city in an hour. Limerick is
a place really close to my heart, because I spent a lot of time being
sad there. It was the perfect place to be sad. I made some friends, and
I found a great local pub, called The Commercial.
Even though we were locked down with COVID and my health was not the
best, because I was depressed, I have a lot of fondness for Limerick.
I think it was really great; to be geographically really far away and
climate wise it was the opposite end of the spectrum from Texas. I
needed some distance from it for sure.”
As far as what she learned about herself during her time in Ireland,
Grace Pettis says, “I learned that I hate being stuck in a room and not
being able to do anything.
My mom is a Quaker, and she is great at being quiet, peaceful, sitting
and being still. I am not good at any of those things. I have a lot of
ADHD. I need to be moving, doing and creating. I need to be progressing
in life and if I am still for too long, I get depressed. That was really
challenging for me, because the work that I needed to do was to just
sit. I needed to do what my body was telling me. Processing a lot of
stuff was hard work and it was really traumatic. I was physically ill
for a while. I just needed to not do. My mom has this quote on the wall
that is really great. It says, don’t just do something, sit there.
I definitely learned how to sit with things that are uncomfortable,
things that are complex and things that you can’t just easily make
meaning out of in three and one-half minutes. You can write all of these
songs about them, and they are things you really are never going to have
closure about. They are
more than ten things at once. They are stories when it isn’t really
clear that there is a good guy or a bad guy. They are just people doing
their best. I think I needed to learn how not to reduce things into
right and wrong, yes or no. I think I needed to sit with the ambiguity
of everything and to accept myself for where I was in that moment.
I (needed) to sit with the loss and process it.
I learned that I could do that.
I enjoy being alone and I can spend the whole day just hanging out with
myself, but I need to be doing something. I have to be cleaning my room
or writing something or going for a walk or watching a movie or maybe I
am dying my hair. I am not good at just sitting and feeling feelings. I
feel like I have to be productive in the world and my time is really
valuable. It is really hard for me to just sit and be,” she says.
Even though, Grace Pettis and I had talked a few years ago, the song
“Horses,” reveals a side of her I had not known.
“It is me (the little girl in the song) and I had a disease when I was a
kid. It is me talking to myself as a little girl. It is also a little
bit from the perspective of my grandmother, both of my grandmothers, but
especially Bobby Harper. I have this pillow that she embroidered, and it
is of a horse I drew. When I was a girl, I drew constantly and part of
it was because I couldn’t do a lot of stuff, because of the juvenile
arthritis that I had. I still have that pillow and that was part of
where the song came from. It was talking about why I had this obsession
with horses and why I had a compulsion to draw horses all of the time. I
had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis when I was a child. It is a
mysterious, inflammatory illness. It goes away in about half of the kids
who have it. I have met people at shows that had it their whole lives,
but mine went away after a few years when I was a (child). There were a
lot of years in my early childhood when I was in pain every day.
I think it was hard, but I think it was a lot harder on my parents. For
me it was reality, and it was just normal, but for my parents I think it
was really upsetting. It was right after their divorce, and it is true
for a lot of kids they have a stress reaction. It is a thing that your
body does after a period of trauma or stress. I think they felt guilty
about it, and it was really expensive and caused a lot of stress, but
there was nothing they could do about it. I had to go to lots of doctors
and had blood drawn once a week. It was an ordeal for them, especially
my mom who was doing a lot of my caretaking at the time,” she remembers.
Describing the album Down To The Letter as being introspective,
Grace Pettis says, “I wrote these songs for myself first and foremost.
They were straight from my diary really. That is the core of songs that
we chose from.”
The song “Sobering Up,” was part of that process.
“My former (spouse) is an addict and I don’t want to get too much into
details about that, because I want to respect his privacy. As it
pertains to me, the song is really about the loved ones of people who
have addictions, and it is an experience that a lot of us go through. I
think it can feel isolating, which is why there are meetings for not
only addicts, but for their family members. This song is for that
community of people. I didn’t come from that. No one in my family had
addictions, so I had no experience, and I was blindsided by it.
I had a long road of figuring out what the hell was happening and
to make sense of it. I am really grateful for that community of other
people who did have experience with it. That was extremely helpful to
me,” she says.
The song, “The Year Of Losing Things,” was written with Tom Prasada-Rao,
who passed away just a few days before our conversation.
“I wrote it with Tom over text during the first year of the pandemic in
2020. We lost him days ago really. He was an incredible songwriter, and
he was beloved by the people who know his songs. I wrote (the song) with
Tom over text during the first year of the pandemic in 2020. It was an
honor to write with him. I have known him since I was a little girl,
because he was a good friend to my dad, and he was one of several
surrogate uncles in the folk music world. I was (later) able to
reconnect with him, as I became an adult, and I became friends with him.
He was a really special person. It is weird talking about him in the
past tense, because he just passed away, but he had been dealing with
cancer for some years. He went through various remissions with good news
then bad news then good news. It was a rollercoaster. At the time he was
coming out of a
relationship. Then the pandemic hit, and he was having all of these
health problems. I was also dealing with some stuff in my personal life
and in my marriage. Everyone in my household lost their jobs. We had to
sell our house. There was just a lot of loss.
We wrote the song about the collective loss that we as a community, as a
nation and individually were dealing with. I think of it as my pandemic
song now. As I was going through these songs about my divorce, my
producer Mary Bragg suggested that we take a look at that one as part of
the collection and I am really glad that she did, because it really ties
a lot of the record together. The record is about my own loss, but I
think more than that it is just about loss and grief and the complexity
of it. How it happens to us on these micro and macro scales. Sometimes
you just lose things and there is not a bow to put on it. It is just a
Blues song. I think of small losses and all that you lost was time or
potential and the future that you hoped you would have. You could lose
your job or your house. I think everybody came out of the pandemic with
a loss of some kind. It can be a loss of faith in our institutions,
whether those are religious or political or family. I think we all lost
something,” she says.
The song “When Nobody’s Watching,” was a songwriting collaboration with
Gary Nicholson.
Grace Pettis talks about the story behind the song, “I think in the
absence of other people’s expectations, who do you want to be as a
person? That is what is
dictating your next steps. You don’t really know who you are until you
are in the absence of the expectations of others. Part of going through
a separation and divorce is stripping yourself of context. You lose the
context of who you are to this other person. Who am I in this community?
Who I am with these in-laws or with these friends we have in common or
in this role I have been in. Doubly so, during COVID everyone was
isolated. You are doubly stripped of context, because you are alone in a
room for the first time in many years. I was not in a car, I was not
touring, I was not on a stage, and I was not in front of other people.
It was just a guitar and me and a bed. Who am I in that context? I think
loss is a great revealer and it strips you down. It can tell you a lot
about yourself for better or for worse.”
As for the album title, Down To The Letter the intent is to say
precisely what you mean.
“That is what I attempted to do in writing these songs and making this
record, Down To The Letter, as in a Dear John and sort of a last
communique. Letter as in a one-way form of communication and you are not
necessarily expecting a response. It is not a text or a phone call when
there is someone immediately on the other side. You send it off. You
also know where to send it. If you have a letter, you have an address.
That presumes that you know where somebody lives. I think too just the
word letter and alluding to writing were all through this record. The
song “Vivian,” is about Johnny Cash’s first wife and to whom he wrote a
thousand love letters. The song, “I Take Care Of Me Now,” has a line,
”And I write my own love letters. ”The Better and the Worst,”
has the title line in it “And down to the letter, I meant
every word.” It (the
record) was a theme about one-way communication. I think the song A
Thousand Times a Day is a one-way letter.
It is very difficult to write these types of songs when the emotions are
still raw, and it must be even more difficult to sing them before an
audience.
“Yes, it took a lot out of me. It took a lot out of me to write these
for myself. It took a lot out of me to be able to play them live.
It took a lot out of me for me to be able to record them. I cried
for several days. It was cathartic, but also painful.
I hope when people listen to it (the record) they remember the person I
was married to is a multi-faceted human being with a lot of different
sides. Our marriage was a multi-faceted thing, and I don’t want people
to take it as a way that is slandering someone. I am very conscious of
the fact that I am the only one with a microphone. I want to be clear
that my ex-husband is a really good person. We have a complicated story,
and he is a really good person,” says Grace Pettis.
Please visit
the website for Grace Pettis
and you can also follow her on
Instagram and find her music on YouTube and
purchase it from your favorite
online store. #GracePettisInterview #GracePettisMusic #AmericanSingerSongwriter #RivetingRiffsMagazine #RivetingRiffs #MusicaEntrevista
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The
song “Rain,” chronicles a heart breaking, both through the words and
tone of the vocals. There is the packing up of suitcases to fly across
the Atlantic Ocean, to Limerick a city in Ireland. It is the raw
beginning of a new journey in life, but first there needs to be healing.