Grace Robinson’s soaring high came from hitting her 'rock bottom'
The Melbourne songwriter's debut single is lots of fun. The journey to getting there was anything but.
There’s something in the way Grace Robinson sings. Her debut single ‘harder than you think’ wears its influences proudly: guitars that could’ve been tuned by fellow Melbourne songwriters Julia Jacklin and Angie McMahon, a Victorian College of the Arts-trained voice that has definitely smashed some Sharon Van Etten at karaoke.
But Robinson works in her own lane. She’s precise but never short on personality. When she lingers and lilts over the verses, it’s lovely on the ears, and when Robinson decides to rock it’s a thrilling little hit of sugar. Pair all that with a chorus that feels made for festival crowds to shriek back and you’ve got one hell of an introduction.
Grace Robinson is, at once, a rookie and a veteran. She’s worn many hats in Australian music for nearly a decade, as the youngest female booking agent in the country and in Empress, a Melbourne electro-soul outfit that found its way onto festival stages like Strawberry Fields and Dark Mofo.
But ‘harder than you think’ is the beginning of Robinson’s newest, most vulnerable chapter — releasing raw rock music under her own name. When we speak, a day before its release, Robinson is excited and panicked.
“I think the panic in this comes down to the fact that this is probably the first time ever that I’m putting something out that feels like I’m just handing people me on a platter,” she says. “And the panic is that someone could shove that back in my face, and that this time, compared to all the other times, I don’t get to then just go, ‘Oh, well, doesn’t matter anyway, wasn’t really me’.”
Putting your art out to the world under your own name is scary enough,1 but especially when your first release is a song as candid as ‘harder than you think’.
“I did a really good job of being like, ‘I’m fucking sorted, guys’ … but it was actually all just a distraction so I could play this character. In reality, I had no fucking idea how to be me,” she says.
Robinson explains a feeling pretty resonant to anyone trying to overachieve: doing too much, taking on tasks beyond your capacity, and saying yes too much. Amplify that with Robinson’s two lives in booking and performing and it all mounted to what she calls “rock bottom”.
“I ended up hitting this crazy anxiety panic disorder thing, where then I just could not function without panic attacks. They were really weird panic attacks, too. Because I’m neuro non-typical as fuck, my brain doesn’t go ‘you’re anxious’, my brain goes ‘your shoulder’s dislocated, what’s up with that?’. Or I’d be like driving, and my brain would be like ‘Your legs are not attached anymore’.”
The crisis forced Robinson to do something she’d never thought herself capable of: stopping. Hitting pause and going to therapy caused Robinson to reflect on her relationship with music.
That process led her back to the guitar. The instrument had gathered dust for five years while Robinson focused on Empress, a group that found a use for basically every instrument other than a six-string.
“I picked up that guitar and it was crazy. It was the first time, probably in six years, that writing music was just easy,” she says. “I just vomited out all these songs, and it was so easy, and so clear that that was the direction to go in, that then everything just from that point just aligned.”
‘harder than you think’ is the first taste of a bigger project recorded during this period, around 18 months ago. The record is unified by a theme of heartbreak, but Robinson — who has a “beautiful eight-year-long relationship” — had to mine beyond the romantic realm for inspiration.
“I don’t write happy songs, I never have and I fucking never will,” Robinson laughs. “But heartbreak’s everywhere and it’s not always in love.”
“A lot of my songs are about heartbreak in other ways, and they all stem from this one moment where I’ll have this feeling and be like, ‘that’s disgusting’, or I’ve just fucked up, or I’ve just over-shared, and I’ll write it down and it just goes from there.”
Robinson reveals the genesis of ‘harder than you think’ came from a therapy session in which she received some tough love.
“My therapist said to me, ‘You are so controlling that I feel like you’re trying to control this session, that you’re trying to show me that you’re really good at this’ … I was like, ‘Damn, man. Shit, it’s probably true … she just fucking called it out deadpan to me, and it was like, ‘Oh shit, the hoax is up’. So, that’s when I started to think about what I actually was going to have to do to get better.”
Cue the ‘getting better’ montage: Robinson wrote new songs, got the band together, and laid some tracks down. Now she’s reaching the point of putting music out, Robinson is simultaneously feeling her experience in music and her newness as a solo artist.
“I feel like I’m constantly feeling like ‘I’ve got my hands on it, and I know what to do’ and then being like, ‘Fuck, I have no idea what I’m doing’. It’s this constant back and forth,” Robinson says.
I tell her that, from where I sit, it seems like her decorated CV has helped her prepare for this moment. Robinson admits that, for her, the feeling’s a bit more complicated.
“It was hard not to have resentment towards that CV and not see it as things that built me, but as things that distracted me,” she says.
“I thought about that a lot, and sometimes I still feel like that, but then I have another moment where I’ll make a call and I know it’s the right call because I’ve managed artists and I’ve booked shows and I’ve worked with people in the industry and you’re so certain that this is the right thing to do.”
What results is something that carries the best of both worlds: an artist whose first release arrives ready for the big time, with all the joy, excitement and panic that comes with starting fresh.
For example: I close our conversation asking Robinson for any dream collaborators, coffee dates or touring partners and the names come thick and fast: Angie McMahon (“I have a horrible tendency of embarrassing myself every time I meet her), Julia Jacklin (“would be amazing to tour with”), Amyl and the Sniffers (“I can’t rock as hard, but incredible people”). Shoutout also to boygenius — “if I could just look at them or sniff them or just know their coffee orders” — and Sharon Van Etten, whose 2019 Hamer Hall show was the “best thing to ever happen” to her.
These are fun details to know, and I will one hundred percent resurface it if/when Robinson joins any of her idols on stage. With a debut song this good, it certainly feels like we’ll be seeing some of the manifestation pay off sooner rather than later.
‘harder than you think’ is out now. Stream it here.
I’ve always said, musicians and Substack writers are the bravest ones doing it. The firefighters don’t like that.