QUARANTINE PROFILE: Gracie and Rachel
We’ve launch a profile series to highlight how artists are spending their time during quarantine. Several times a week we’ll highlight a new artist across the globe and see how they’re keeping busy during COVID-19 lockdowns.
Incase you haven’t heard of them, Gracie and Rachel are a piano-violin duo currently hailing from Brooklyn. I had the pleasure of booking them years ago for their first show in Philly and I remember their set blowing everyone away. It’s been so great to see how they continue to evolve with their unique sound and pressing lyrics. Cut to today where we’re waiting in anticipation for their next album release Hello Weakness, You Make Me Strong, which is dropping Sept 18 via Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe Records. We have a chat to see what they’ve been up to during lockdown and how they are keeping creative.
Gracie and Rachel Online: Spotify | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
This is us in our loft by our instruments, where we've been live streaming from.
Where have you been spending your quarantine?
We’ve been spending our time with each other, in our loft, which is regular life for us. We’ve been quarantined together for seven years now, so really nothing new here. Being in our own chosen isolation together for so long has revealed an abundance of challenging moments as well as so many empowering ones. At the end of the day, we have each other and our little imperfect artistic nest where we grow ideas and mess them up, but always together. It’s been comforting in a way to see people experiencing this over involved living-working scenario we’ve been in ourselves for so long. Welcome, everyone! It’s exhausting and beautiful and exhausting again. You’re gonna do great.
How have you been staying busy during quarantine?
We’ve been getting creative with making visual pieces for our record during this time. We had to get creative with music video concepts due to the state of things, but we’ve ended up feeling really grateful for the time as it’s been getting different things out of us we might not otherwise have discovered. We were supposed to go to Joshua Tree in April to film a music video for one of our singles, Underneath, but that ended up not being able to happen, so we found some sand dunes on the East Coast and filmed a video of us taking off all our layers and really got underneath ourselves in the process, and it was so liberating and terrifying and liberating again.
Album you’ve had on repeat:
serpentwithfeet’s new EP Apparition has been on strong rotation. Sudan Archives is also an inspiration. We have to admit though that the vinyl test pressings of our new music have been playing on repeat as well, as we’ve been checking them to make sure there are no crackles and pops before going into full printing production, so we’ve become overly familiar with our own songs.
What’s keeping Gracie and Rachel sane right now: The upright piano in our loft. This piano has been a source of inspiration for us, listening forgivingly whenever we need it.
What’s the best advice you’ve received during this time?
Move toward the unknown.
What’s something you miss the most right now?
The stage! We miss the high adrenaline feelings of performing live in a room filled with people. We miss the electric power of a show. Will admit we don’t miss each other because we’re always together, but that’s okay.
Anything new we should know about that you’re working on?
We will be dropping our record, Hello Weakness, You Make Me Strong, on September 18th via Righteous Babe Records with more visuals and b-side treats to follow, and we hope you’ll take this music with you into your sphere someway, somehow. Beyond music, we’re working on ourselves, so stay tuned for how that exploration evolves, hopefully translated through a song near you.