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Gracie Abrams: Now center stage

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In the middle of New York City is a spot that Gracie Abrams calls a secret garden: a park where she says she can hang out unnoticed (when TV cameras aren’t around, that is). It’s a respite from a life where she’s very much front-and-center.

At 26, Abrams is a reigning queen of so-called whisper pop – her witty, intimate style praised by critics and millions of fans around the world. She’s graced the top of Billboard charts, Chanel ads, and the most recent cover of Vogue. 

Backstage on tour last summer, she told us she still seemed stunned by it all: “I’m constantly pinching myself,” she said. “And I don’t know at what point you could get to where you’re not doing that.”

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Correspondent Tracy Smith with singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams. 

CBS News

Being center-stage didn’t come naturally to Abrams. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she always had a passion for songwriting, but not necessarily performing. She says she felt fear from the idea of sharing her songs: “Like, just really physical fear … in the pit of your stomach. I felt that when I would hear footsteps coming down the hall, and I would stop playing.”

She eventually got up the nerve to post a few songs online, such as “Minor.”

“I don’t know what my goal was,” Abrams said. “I think it was probably that naïve kind of concept of the internet that it’s not real – you know what I mean? I’m like, ‘Okay.’ It was easier to hide behind.”

The gamble paid off. By 2019 Abrams had her first record deal. And thanks in part to COVID, she did her first tour on Zoom from her bedroom. “It was such a gift, because I was vomiting at the thought of performing!” she laughed. “And then I got to do it in the comfort of my own space. And it felt like this baby step.”

That baby step turned into a running leap onto the world’s largest stages. By 2022, Abrams was opening for some of the brightest stars in music: Olivia Rodrigo, and then Taylor Swift. Stepping out onto stage on Swift’s Eras Tour, Abrams said, “felt like being in some kind of, like, alternate universe. It was just the best thing.”

Night Three Of Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour - London, UK
Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams perform on stage during “Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour,” at Wembley Stadium, June 23, 2024 in London.

Gareth Cattermole/TAS24 via Getty Images

Asked what advice she took from Swift, Abrams said, “The first thing that comes to mind when you ask that is, like, the encouragement to just never stop writing. For me, any time I had a feeling where I was like, ‘I would rather just cry about this for a while,’ [instead], just pick it up and write it down. And it serves you every time to do that.” 

And now, Abrams is selling out arenas on her own – with audiences singing her words back to her. “It just doesn’t feel like it’s remotely about me,” she said. “I love it, but it feels like even though they might be my words, they’ve adopted them and made them their own.”

Still, Abrams has had to deal with accusations of nepotism. Her mom, Katie McGrath, is an entertainment executive, and dad J.J. Abrams created hit TV shows and directed a couple of “Star Wars” films. Being blessed with successful parents means she has also heard the term “nepo baby.”

“My parents have both worked in the entertainment industry since before I was born,” she said. “And I think there is no question there are a million visible and invisible ways in which I have benefited as a result of my proximity. I am the luckiest person in the world to have grown up learning from the two of them in all of the ways. It’s been everything, of course.”

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Singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams. 

CBS News

In fact, instead of avoiding talking about her parents, Abrams has leaned in. Her latest album, out Friday, is called “Daughter From Hell.” Its title track is a love song for her mom, one Abrams calls “very overdue.”

“I sent it to my mom, I was like, ‘So sorry it took me 26 years to write one that wasn’t laced with, you know, some kind of angsty anger,'” she laughed. “I’m like, ‘I want to be you now, Mom!'”

Her mother’s reaction? Abrams said it “got” her – and talking about it “got” Abrams, too: “I want more than ever to say thank you to the people that made me who I am, and who have given every ounce of love that they have. So … I’m like, it’s so weird to get emotional with my … ! But it is true.”

The first single released from the album was the emotional anthem “Hit the Wall.”

And when she goes on tour later this year, some of the lyrics fans will be screaming were written in the quiet little garden in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “I feel very, yeah, grateful to this particular stretch of land,” Abrams said.

She is also well aware of the fleeting and fickle nature of fame. In fact, she wrote a song about it, “Look At My Life.”

How long have I got
In the hot light till the shine rusts? …

But oh well, look at my life
Bet you can’t tell but it’s kind of a bad time
A new spiral every night
Bawling my eyes out, no, but I’m so fine
Yeah, I might just shut up and drive
Hope I don’t crash and blow out the headlights
My nightmare actualized
Got what I wanted, it doesn’t sit right

Asked about the line “How long have I got in the hot light?” Abrams said, “There’s always the next girl, there’s always the next shiny object, there’s always the next great show. My hope is longevity, not like white-hot moment, you know? So, I want to do this thing for as long as, you know, the people will have me. And when they don’t want to have me anymore, I will still be hopefully here, making stuff!”

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Watch an extended interview with Gracie Abrams and producer Aaron Dessner (Video)

Extended interview: Gracie Abrams, Aaron Dessner

20:38

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Story produced by Julie Kracov and Sara Kugel. Editor: Steven Tyler. 

What an undergrad wants you to know about college parent Facebook groups

By CNN
My daughter saw a mouse in her dorm room — what should she do? What brand of rain boots should I buy for my student? Should I hire a private service to wash my child’s clothes, or teach them to do their own laundry?When my older brother decided where to go to college four years ago, one of my mom’s friends sent her a link to something no one in my family had ever known existed: an admitted students Facebook page. Not for the students. For the parents.It was full of posts from stressed-out parents commiserating, ranting, and asking many specific and overbearing questions: What were the specs of a certain dorm room? How can I get access to my kid’s grades? Do I need to get my child to sign something to get access to his medical records?Facebook is now home to hundreds of groups specifically for parents of college students. Most of these groups are private and have thousands of members. To join, the volunteer administrators usually require proof of a student’s admission, like screenshots or scans of an admissions letter for a page administrator to review. These pages appear to be run by parents themselves, not the colleges, and passed down from parent administrator to parent administrator as students graduate.Should I know your child hasn’t made any friends?While many posts are about more practical matters, like what appliances are allowed and the need for mattress toppers, some parents are sharing detailed posts about a student’s lack of friends, mental health and other struggles — with thousands of strangers.There are also posts from parents expressing their deep grief and sorrow about their child leaving home, and their fear that they and their kid will not be able to handle this new stage of life.“Parents are … showing videos of themselves crying, where they drop off their kids. Like, they’re showing very skewed perspectives of extremes,” said Dr. Robyne Hanley-Dafoe, a Toronto area-based psychology and education behaviorist and author. “The vast majority of what we see anyway is the fact that like, yes, there’s big feelings and yes, there’s transitions, but it’s not nearly as extreme as what’s presented in social media.”It’s true the transition from high school to college can be a taxing and scary time for students and parents, as I experienced last fall. But I think the Facebook groups, while answering some questions, overdramatize the experience of sending a kid off to college. While a few of my mom’s friends said the groups could occasionally provide helpful information, they also said it created unnecessary stress about the big change.The scary transition to independenceYoung adults living away home, without a highly structured school day with classes and extracurriculars dominating most of their time, are going to make mistakes. How could they not, with new professors, classes, friends and social expectations? Things often don’t go according to plan. That’s when some parents post about those struggles, trying to help solve the problems themselves.When parents parachute in, they’re sending a message that their child can’t learn to fix problems themselves, according to Hanley-Dafoe. “It rocks the person’s confidence and their efficacy, which is their belief that they’re able to do things,” she said. This belief is vital for a student to do well in college and the rest of their life.I giggled when my mom read out a post about a kid losing his expensive coat at a party, and his worried father asking hundreds of other parents to ask their children to check their closets to see if they accidentally took it. Then I cringed a little, because that son is a real person who might not even know his father is spreading his dirty (or in this case, lost) laundry all over the internet.As my brother told me before I went to college, a little mystery can be a good thing. There is no mystery, or even basic privacy, when your worried parents are broadcasting your lost mittens or failed midterm exam to 5,000 people on a Facebook page. College students should not have to worry about their parents embarrassing them to an audience of thousands. And I should not know about another student’s personal struggles from their parent’s post.Why are these pages so popular with parents?The transition to college, especially freshman year, can be incredibly hard for students and parents. It was for me. By all measures everything went well, yet I was still painfully homesick for my entire first year. And there wasn’t much my parents could do, especially from hundreds of miles away. But they helped in little ways, like calling me, and I found ways to mitigate my struggles myself.“If you are kind of an obsessively involved parent, it scratches that itch for you,” said Dr. Lynn Lyons, a Concord, New Hampshire-based psychotherapist, of the Facebook parent groups. “And if you are not, and you venture into that world, you can be very easily convinced that you are not doing enough, that you should be monitoring your kid, that you should be decorating her dorm room.” Lyons is the author of “The Anxiety Audit: 7 Sneaky Ways Anxiety Takes Hold and How To Escape Them.”Parents need to shift from parenting up close to parenting from afar. Some parents are just not making the necessary change, according to experts.“We’re starting to see parents who have become extremely involved in the decision-making and the critical thinking for a lot of our young adults,” Hanley-Dafoe said. “Sometimes, we’ve done our students a wee bit of a disservice by not letting them figure things out on their own.”What should parents do to help?During my move-in day last fall, parents were unceremoniously separated from their kids at 3 p.m., when the new freshman class went to a ceremony on the football field and parents were told to leave campus. I came back to my half-set-up single room and finished unpacking myself. I had no plan and no roommate to go with me to events. A day later, I left on a backpacking trip for orientation. Even though it was superhard in the moment, I’m glad I was forced to just figure things out on my own.Many parents “have a really hard time tolerating their children’s distress, and so they don’t give their child the opportunity to tolerate their distress, right?” Lyons said. “But the ability to get through tough stuff on their own is a hugely important skill. The way that you know that you will be able to handle a tough transition is because you just got through one.”Now, that’s not to say parents can’t show up and give helpful advice. My mom visited several times, for parents’ weekend or for my choral concerts. It was comforting to have set dates when I knew that I’d get to see my mom, so that when my homesickness was at its worst, I could remind myself that it was only two weeks or so until I would see her again.I also called my parents for troubleshooting and advice. They were the ones to tell me that it was a good idea to make an appointment with my adviser to select classes, to go to office hours and to not worry about finding my best friends within the first week. A lot of problems I still handled on my own, and sometimes it really sucked. But I made it through, and now I know I can do it again. Other kids can, too, without their parents interfering on Facebook groups.The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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