Many of us can link a certain album to pivotal moments in our lives. Whether it’s the first record you bought with your own money, the chord you first learnt to play on guitar, the song that soundtracked your first kiss, the album that got you those awkward and painful pubescent years or the one that set off light bulbs in your brain and inspired you to take a big leap of faith into the unknown – music is often the catalyst for change in our lives and can even help shape who we become.
In this Love Letter To A Record series, Music Feeds asks artists to reflect on their relationship with music and share with us stories about the effect music has had on their lives.
GRAACE – Daughter, ‘If You Leave’ (2013)
I’ll never forget the first time I heard of Daughter. The album [If You Leave] came out in 2013, the year after my dad passed away. I was 14, and dealing with the loss of him and all the added on growing up, navigating being a young hormonal teen on top of that. I spent most of my time at school with my headphones in and my head down, I didn’t like talking to people much after having to go back to school 2 weeks after we’d found out the news. I was a bit of an outcast and people avoided me because they weren’t yet able to navigate the conversation around my Dad at that age, which is totally understandable now that I look back.
It’s one of the most beautiful albums I’ve listened to, to this day and yet also the saddest. I’ve cried to it so many times I can’t count. I felt like a burden to my friends because of my depression and Daughter managed to yet make me feel like I wasn’t alone in the hardest times of my life.
I quit writing and playing music for about a year or two in my spare time because it reminded me of my father. But once I heard ‘Youth’ in 2012 It made me want to cover it straight away. It brought me back the enjoyment of music.
It was definitely an up and down journey growing up and I remember some incredibly happy moments with loved ones and that is almost like the feeling I get now when I listen to ‘Youth’ and then I turn to songs like ‘Smother’ when I feel like it’s all getting too much. She managed to capture so many emotions in depth that carry me away when I turn on the album.
She was one of the first artists I ever saw live in Sydney that I bought my own tickets too. One of my good friends Ruby Fields was there with her other friend at the same time and I’ll never forget looking over to her during the intimate church concert and we both had tears dripping down our faces. The way she was able to capture a whole crowd without speaking in between was so mesmerizing. She barely spoke a word outside of the music itself which I admired so much, but I do remember her fucking up at one point, a small note, and ever so quietly saying “shit” into the microphone. Everybody loved it. You could tell her love for music was so real and that she was enjoying every minute of the concert which made me leave loving her music even more.
All this talk about the album means I’ve gotta go chuck it on right now.
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Listen to GRAACE’s latest single, an electro-pop banger produced by Hayden James, entitled ‘Body Language’, here.
