Kait's One-Track Mind #1 - Gracie Abrams' "That's So True"

Wait I think I’ve been there tooooOOooOoo (with a nepo baby's trendy song stuck in my head)

Hey, playlist pals. I wanted to write a new kind of piece for this newsletter, that opens up the format to talk about music in other ways. Making playlists is fun, but there’s so many other ways I (and you, surely) experience and enjoy music!

So here’s the first in a new format I call Kait Wilbur’s One-Track Mind, where I write about the singles that have been intriguing/plaguing/haunting/fueling me.

November has had its ups and downs — for me personally and kinda for the whole world. But before the election results threw a giant bomb on the vibe of the entire country, I got to jump on a different kind of bomb. A glitter bomb.

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was everything I’d hoped would be: an impressive sampling of the decades-deep catalog of a modern legend that I watched alongside my two best friends, covered in glitter and with friendship bracelets on hand. It was like summer camp for adults, if there were also kids there!

Throughout the evening, I made sure to take note of the logistics behind the magic, those tedious necessities that needed to happen to ensure the audience a sublime concert experience: the Uber that dropped us off a ten-minute walk away from the stadium; the pleasant employees moving sparkly fans and their handlers seamlessly through lines; the musical interludes between songs just long enough to let Taylor to switch costumes and sip some Throat Coat.

One of those logistics was Gracie Abrams, pop ingénue and twentysomething daughter of major Hollywood producer/director JJ Abrams. An artist almost perfectly crafted to temper the crowd’s hunger for songs that sound kind of like Taylor Swift while also giving them the option of getting a snack or going to the bathroom before the three-hour main event.

I approached my concert as a Gracie Abrams hater. I didn’t find her music particularly compelling. Her move through the rich-hot-connected-kid to pop-girl-of-the-moment pipeline left a bad taste in my mouth. Nothing about her persona captivated me. (Though it was fun wondering for a few minutes if Academy Award nominee Paul Mescal would make a stop in Indianapolis, Indiana.)

My hater flame was stoked when Gracie came onstage in this gown I assume she’d worn in a Mormon wedding a few hours before:

You know what they always say— an average-looking girl’s “found in the costume closet for you to wear in the chorus of Fiddler on the Roof” dress is a hot girl’s “open for the biggest artist of our generation” dress.

But something else was brewing. An earworm. A well-marketed, well-positioned, I’ll even go as far as to say mostly well-written earworm flooding directly from my TikTok feed into my subconscious— Gracie’s song “That’s So True.”

The song first came to my attention as something between a dance trend and a lip sync trend. The second verse is performed in such a distinctive talk-sing, in the tradition of modern “it girl” pop and reminiscent of modern musical theater conventions. There’s this indignant, raw, almost bratty (not to be confused with brat) way Gracie delivers “what’d she do to get you off/ taking down her hair like oh my god” that is just so easy and delicious to embody.

What it becomes is not necessarily a signature dance, but a signature demeanor, a strut, an attitude. It invokes singing to yourself when you just need to feel it, embody it, stomp around your room to it. And folks across the Tok have picked up what it’s putting down. (Most notably to me is comedian Brian Jordan Alvarez, whose parasocial dance clips have helped him promote his wonderful Hulu sitcom English Teacher.)

Soon, another portion of the song went viral— its bridge, delivered in the same quickened wordvomit pace. This part is deployed to soundtrack aesthetic clips of “life lately,” which often feature young women dancing, with friends, near bodies of water, clinking glasses at a dinner table, and the like.

The lyrics of this section don’t particularly match the vibe here— “made it out alive, but I think I lost it/ said that I was fine, said it from the coffin/ remember how I died?” She’s singing about raw, pissed-off heartbreak while we’re seeing sparklers being lit and cheeks being kissed.

My read, though, is that the song’s essence feels so much like living through a beautiful complicated moment in real time. The ethos (or “vibes,” they might say on TikTok) is more important than the lyrical content. It’s like when couples play “Skinny Love” or “The Night We Met” at their weddings— two lyrically heartbreaking songs if their fans care to take off their tiny art director beanies and listen.

What Gracie might lack in lyricism, she makes up for in essence. She understands that the words you say don’t matter as much as how you say them, and why you say them. And if how you say them is through a burrowing melody, and why you say them is because you’re so fuckin sad-mad in a way every woman and probably every person has been sad-mad, you’ve got a nice little recipe for an irresistible pop song.

Now, I’m not saying the song is good. It’s not particularly poetic, and the song as a whole isn’t quite as great as the sum of its parts. 

Yet I find myself walking through the hallways at work lip-syncing to the second verse. Because feeling that emotion of betrayal and throwing a little quippy shitfit, just for a few seconds, is kinda fun. We all owe ourselves a quippy little shitfit every once in a while. 

That’s part of the magic of pop music— feeling the funnest, biggest, most accessible, most visceral feelings, whenever we want. Because feeling is a really cool feature of being alive.

So because all of that, I was able to put my snobbery, my bias against nepo babies, and maybe even my better judgment as a music fan aside and sing along to “That’s So True” along with the rest of Taylor Swift’s Big Adult Summer Camp. Because I paid 250 dollars to listen to a woman play guitar and feel.

Thanks for reading this first edition of Kait’s Incredibly Specific Playlists 2: It’s Not Even Playlists Anymore! (That’s the alt title for this new format. I think I like the other one more.)

If you liked this piece I would love for you to share it with your pals!

And if you’re one of those pals this has been shared with, and you’d like to see more of this kind of thing, why don’t you…?

This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for middle-of-the-road pop music, Brian Jordan Alvarez’s other parasocial dance clips, and of course you, readers. Enjoy your turkey naps!