This essay first appeared in the NPR Music newsletter. Sign up for early access to articles like this one, listening recommendations and more.
If you're a pop fan or just someone who's curious about what's trending, you've probably noticed a recent uptick in sightings of Gracie Abrams' eloquent face. With her third album, Daughter from Hell, hitting this week, she's been making the rounds on all your screens, appearing on The Tonight Show and The New York Times' Popcast, discussing life in fame's fishbowl with Olivia Rodrigo for Spotify and blushing at producer Aaron Dessner's gushing praise during an extended segment of CBS Sunday Morning. Abrams always has a lot to say, but her face speaks more: Her brown eyes flash below punctuation-mark eyebrows, she squinches up her mouth to show she's processing a difficult thought, her chin juts forward or pulls upward as a moment of defiance melts into vulnerability. She could be an actor, she and the camera are so well matched. Instead, Abrams is the singer-songwriter who's come to represent the wide appeal of confessional writing as well as the pitfalls.
To her fans, many of whom are young women, Abrams embodies the intensity and confusion of being a young person whose potential is unfolding, not always in positive ways. (She writes as much about ruining relationships as about getting her heart smashed.) Critics — and there are more than a few — find her writing vague and her up-close singing style irritating. The connections and financial cushion she admits to utilizing as the daughter of Hollywood A-listers J.J. Abrams and Katie McGrath have made her the center of a tedious debate about "nepo babies," but the reception of her music is a familiar one regarding hitmaking singer-songwriters. Since the early 1970s, when Lester Bangs wrote his famous diatribe "James Taylor Marked for Death," successful practitioners have often toed the line between accessibility and perceived insipidness. Like her previous releases, Daughter from Hell is earning Abrams a mix of embraces and rejections — raves from Rolling Stone and The Associated Press, tough critiques from The Guardian and Pitchfork. Is Abrams raw and devastating or as saccharine as icing sugar? Could she be both? An artist this polarizing always signifies something more (sometimes better, sometimes worse) than what can be discovered upon first listen.
While most of Abrams' defenders praise the same thing others despise — her way of dwelling in a state of unrest that stays messy, with metaphors knocking into each other, vague assertions left hanging and Abrams's jittery, springing way of singing saying more than her lyrics offer on the page. Her fans relate to her raw writing and even her skittish vagueness, which feels very stream-of-consciousness in a pop world when craftsmanship is valued above all. For some listeners, Abrams' awkward emotionality soothes wounds in a way that more clever turns of phrase cannot. "They're goofy lyrics, delivered like they're being spoken over the phone to your best friend," writes Substack culture critic Sarah G. Blade in one touchingly personal defense. Everyone agrees that Abrams is imperfect, a striver who swings big and is still climbing toward the apex of her talent. But why do people care so much that she is taking up space?
One answer might come in considering the early years of another singer-songwriter's career — one who, in her mid-20s, was also entering into full stardom with considerable baggage. In 1971, Carly Simon was enjoying her first charting hit, "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be," and the endorsement of starmakers like Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times, while dodging accusations that she was both too imitative of peers like Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins and getting a leg up from her well-connected family. Like Abrams, whose dad has directed Star Wars movies, Simon grew up among artists and tastemakers due to her lucky birth; her father, Richard, cofounded the publishing house Simon & Schuster. "It's that connotation of the poor little rich girl," Simon told a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution that year. "You know, that she doesn't have any soul."
The advantages Simon couldn't deny, like Abrams' today, did aid in her rise, but not because anyone purchased her success. Simon grew up in a Riverdale apartment frequented by "sophisticated New York people" and started performing in clubs with her sister Lucy as a teen. Later she would marry her fellow soft-rock heartthrob Taylor, entering into a royal pop marriage that spanned the 1970s.
Abrams spent her adolescence in the LA pop hothouse that's the reverse-mirror image of the 1960s folk scene that nurtured Simon; her high-school boyfriend, Blake Slatkin, interned with producer Benny Blanco at 16 and soon went on to produce megahits for Justin Bieber and Lizzo. Her best friend and frequent cowriter Audrey Hobert had a flourishing TV-writing career at 23. Currently, she's hooked up with actor Paul Mescal, who has a co-writing credit on one song on Daughter from Hell; this union also mirrors the soft-rock era, when Taylor starred in the road movie Two Lane Blacktop and actors like Shaun Cassidy became singing heartthrobs, too.
For all of her emotionality, Abrams is a Hollywood child who is clearly fascinated by the work of making art. That tension is interesting. In her Popcast episode, Abrams recalled sitting in studios with Slatkin as his career was blowing up, absorbing the lessons of the studio while she herself clung to her acoustic guitar. Like Simon, who explained that while she appreciated her privilege, it also caused "a desire to break away from that and, like, be a bum," Abrams writes songs that rub up against her privilege in interesting ways. Simon wrote classics like "You're So Vain" while still hanging out on yachts and in bathrooms with white lines on the counter. Abrams writes about older men as friendly predators and the pop life as a gilded cage while striving to succeed within its confines. Both women are watchful commentators speaking from inside a particular, privileged feminine experience. That stance can earn vitriol from many different sides — from those who feel that such a viewpoint already holds too much space in the culture, others who never took it seriously in the first place and still others who want the most from anyone trying to examine and critique femininity, rejecting anything that feels too soft, too unsettled, too lacking in fully formed vision.
Since her early bedroom recordings inspired Rodrigo and many other girls on the cusp of their next phase, Abrams has been forming a sound that can serve that experience of questioning her own desires and assumptions while still being under their sway. She's become a much better singer, learning from the cinematic language she inherited, zooming in for breathy verses and out for resounding choruses and punctuating her phrases with whoops and sighs, the musical equivalent of the lens flares her dad uses in his sci-fi flicks.
This style drives many listeners crazy, but on Daughter from Hell Abrams uses it expertly to tell stories of the Hollywood-to-NYC milieu where she grew up. It's not what she says in these songs, it's how she sings it: Matching Dessner's effort to blend folkish directness with ambient spaciousness, Abrams has developed a style that can feel confidential in both organic and technologically imposed ways — sometimes like a spit-wet murmur, sometimes like a selfie that's not to be shared. It's very different from the resonant but plain-spoken voice Simon used on her early albums, but it serves a similar function, supporting songs that are all about people constantly performing, even when they don't realize they're doing so.
Abrams and Simon share another quality that, I think, can throw off judgments of their work. Both are songwriters (and, in Simon's case, a vocal interpreter) who are keenly interested in and engaged with the work of their peers and immediate elders, showing their inspirations on their sleeves. In a 1970 review, the critic Don Heckman challenged Simon to be cautious of a level of "professionalism" that was making her mannered and less than original. Abrams often endures similar critiques; incessantly compared to her mentor, Taylor Swift and distant artistic cousin, Phoebe Bridgers, she receives little credit for the twists she gives a formula that currently serves countless young singer-songwriters. Immersing myself in the songs on Daughter from Hell, I could certainly hear what she's still borrowing from her primary sources — rapid-fire verses exploding into mounting choruses, a la Swift; an approach to dynamics that always circles back toward a kind of uncomfortable intimacy, even when expanding toward transcendence, which she learned from Bridgers.
Abrams does bring her own reads to these techniques, however. A more naturally resonant singer than Swift and a wilder one than Bridgers, she shows a willingness to convey those awkward, painful emotions that fascinate her in her singing itself, through unexpected leaping notes, broken breathing, swallowed phrases. That may be why, of the many pop stars he's assisted, Abrams is the one Dessner considers a partner: Her blend of prettiness and sometimes jarring choices complements his desire to meld intimate acoustic music with electronics and other experimental elements.
Carly Simon eventually found a hugely productive lane as a diva, lending gravitas and glamor to big ballads and Bond themes. She's now a certified legend, poised for a new round of appreciation — in fact, her first album of new songs, Comes in Waves, arrives next month. As for Abrams, it feels like she is still in her exploratory phase; the more robust arrangements she and Dessner explore on Daughter from Hell don't announce a new phase as much as put a bow around a successful early arc. It's more difficult now than ever for artists to grow up in public, overscrutinized as they are. I look forward to Abrams' 30s, when her penchant for drama and musical jump cuts may recede a bit. She hasn't yet written a song as trenchant as Simon classics like "We Have No Secrets" or "Legend in Your Own Time." But if her heartfelt cries are to be believed, she wants to get there.
Copyright 2026 NPR
