American singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams performs during the Glastonbury Festival in England last month.Scott A Garfitt/The Associated Press
It’s notable that Gracie Abrams got famous by being quiet.
When she signed with Interscope Records in 2019, she was an intelligent, introspective Gen Z’er, the daughter of director dad J.J. Abrams and a budding musician with dreams of making it big. When she posted snippets of original songs to social media, she never believed they’d spark – in the videos, her voice was whisper-soft, almost as if she hoped no one might hear her sing.
But over the course of the pandemic, those snippets blazed into fully produced tracks, then EPs, then albums. She began to tour, serenading a growing fandom of young women in white hairbows with quiet ballads about heartbreak.
Throughout her rise to commercial success – at least, until the past year or so – Abrams elected to murmur. She laid low when “nepo baby” discourse kaboomed in 2022, and even on her most recent album, The Secret of Us, her vocals err toward demure – hardly a sound suited to stadiums.
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But the tide seemed to turn for Abrams when Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour came along. Abrams served as an opening act for Swift in several cities (including Toronto and Vancouver), and suddenly, her fan base exploded in size. There was pressure to perform at scale: Historically, bedroom pop has seldom translated to football fields.
The gamble worked. Abrams’s voice swelled into something healthier and huskier than her TikTok contemporaries such as Lizzy McAlpine and Maisie Peters (the latter of whom also opened for Swift on the Eras Tour, to much more mixed response). Almost overnight, Abrams became a household name – at least to households that included women born after 1995.
The Abrams that played Toronto’s Budweiser Stage on Saturday night, clad in a classy black dress and sensible three-inch pumps, is an Abrams nearly unrecognizable from the young woman who tiptoed onto the scene six years ago. Her voice, muscular and confident, pairs extraordinarily well with screeching crowds of preteens. On Saturday, Abrams’s future as a generational artist, perhaps one day even on par with Swift, seemed all but certain.
Abrams opens for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in Vancouver in December.Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters
Artists aren’t often better live than they are on their records – and if they are, that’s usually thanks in large part to flashy stage effects. Abrams, however, might be the exception: Smart new arrangements of her songs amp up the percussion and bass, adding an urgent, infectious drive to the tracks engraved on the hearts of the audience. On Saturday, her voice cartwheeled across octaves in songs such as Friend as she waved to the crowd, crouching to accept gifts from the most committed women in the front row of the pit.
Following a commendable opening performance from the Arctic Monkeys-esque Djo, Abrams took the stage just before 9 p.m., starting the night off with her recent hit Risk, a jaunty guitar anthem with a killer bridge (a recurring trait in Abrams’s writing).
Then, another banger, Blowing Smoke, an ode to bitterness with a rousing chorus. Before long, she slowed things down, honouring her quiet roots with a few melancholy chirps: Death Wish, an unreleased piano ballad, then Packing It Up, a sweet love song on guitar.
Before long, the energy swelled back up to Risk levels with a few of Abrams’s angrier, more heartsick ballads: I Told You Things, from The Secret of Us, and an old favourite, I Miss You, I’m Sorry. (Not to be confused with I Love You, I’m Sorry, another well-bridged staple in the Abrams-verse.)
Singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams, daughter of Hollywood director J.J. Abrams, opens the first of six Taylor Swift concerts in Toronto.
Brad Wheeler/The Globe and Mail
And, of course, Abrams played an extended version of Us., the duet she wrote with Swift for her last album. (On Saturday, she sang both parts herself, with the crowd filling in for Swift’s harmonies and countermelodies, much to Abrams’s evident glee.)
And she’d never bid a gig adieu without a few encores: That’s So True, her most successful track to date, and Close to You, an electro-pop smash that all but demands head-banging.
It’s difficult to assess Abrams’s work without drawing comparisons to her friend, mentor and collaborator Swift, who less than a year ago literally shut Toronto down with six sold-out shows at Rogers Centre. Abrams isn’t at that level yet – there’s room for her team to further finesse the video montages that flank her performances, and the experience might also benefit from a more creative lighting design that complements Abrams’s relative stillness onstage.
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But Abrams did her homework while on the Eras Tour. She learned how to banter with a crowd – how to ask the rain-soaked fans in the cheap seats if their Aperol spritzes had just the right ratio of liqueur to bubbles. Halfway through the concert, she read aloud a journal entry thanking her fans not only for their support of her, but for their support of each other – their willingness to hand each other water, exchange friendship bracelets (another Swift-ism) and keep each other safe.
The sincerity of that essay bled through her pores – at no point did Abrams seem anything but grateful, even as she forgot the lyrics to a track late in the show. (Hey, at least she’s singing live!)
Yes, Abrams was raised in privilege, and there’s room to debate if she’d have gotten this far in her career without her last name opening doors to her early successes. But over the past year or so, Abrams has learned how to speak up – how to fill a whole city with songs bled straight from her veins, sung to perfection without a single errant note. That level of craft can’t be nepo’d.