Gracie Abrams Recounts ‘Best Night Ever’ Writing ‘Us’ With Taylor Swift in a Kitchen

The Grammy-nominated artist’s highly-anticipated sophomore album is out today.

Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams / John Shearer/Getty Images and Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

The entire TikTok community could scream the chorus lyrics to Gracie Abrams’s “Close to You” long before the song was ever released. The singer teased the viral single for almost seven years before releasing it earlier this month, ahead of her highly-anticipated sophomore album, The Secret of Us, which is out today, June 21.

The 24-year-old singer, who has already racked up a “Best New Artist” Grammy Award nomination, is on top of the world. She also just collaborated with Taylor Swift on a song, which is the dream of any young female musician.

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“We were at dinner and we had a lot of Cosmos. And we were talking about our lives and talking about our experiences that fueled our albums. She was in the middle of [The] Tortured Poets [Department] at the time, and I was in the middle of this, and we just got so excited talking about it. She was like, we have to go back to the house and listen to everything,” Abrams recalled in a recent Glamour story. “We were theater kids in the kitchen, kind of just performing our songs to each other. It was the best night ever.”

The California native, who opened for several of Swift’s “The Eras Tour” shows last year, added that around midnight, she and the 34-year-old started playing music that producer Aaron Dessner sent to them.

Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams / TAS2023/Getty Images

“There was this one piece that we both connected to, and we just immediately started writing a song until six in the morning. It totally couldn’t have been less planned, but it was the most fun,” she shared of the moment that resulted in the track “Us.” “It was very kind of chaotic in the best way, just electric energized conversations that led to the song that we both really deeply love.… I feel obviously wildly lucky that she is on this album for many reasons. One of them being that the way our song came together was the same way that all the songs Audrey [Hobert] and I wrote came together. Just really having super-important conversations with your girlfriends, and then translating those and turning them into [a song].”

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The “I miss you, I’m sorry” singer will soon embark on her first headlining tour. Find tour dates and tickets here.