Q&A: Grace Gardner is Ready to Run the ‘Recovery Mile’
ON THE LAST LAP OF ADOLESCENCE — Grace Gardner is finally able to reflect on the harder times of her childhood. Gardner, originally from Texas and now based in Philadelphia, is gearing up to release her second EP, Recovery Mile. Her latest single, “Cleanup Dive,” is a soul stirring excavation through her mind, set to a beautifully simple instrumentation.
Gardner has always dreamed of being a musician but was traveling a more conventional path before landing where she is now. When she decided to release her first original song, “Radio Silence,” in October 2021, she was studying neuroscience in college. Since then, Gardner has amassed a deeply loyal and likeminded fanbase, which she considers to be more of a community.
After a preview of the then-unreleased “Deny Me” hit the TikTok algorithm, Gardner was able to slowly build anticipation for her first EP, Peach, released earlier this year.
Like many artists looking to reach an audience, Gardner took to TikTok to share her music. But where other artists shy away from getting personal on the platform, Gardner leans into it. She has opened up about mental health in an authentic and compassionate way, allowing her community to feel supported by and connected to her.
Gardner is moving into adulthood with a new sense of assurance that she’s equipped to handle the more challenging times. Her forthcoming EP is a way to process what needs to be processed, and Gardner is ready to leave it in the past, knowing that there is always a new set of hurdles waiting on the track.
Luna had a chance to sit down with Gardner as she shared some thoughtful words. Read the interview below.
LUNA: Congrats on your two-year anniversary of releasing original music. Looking back, what are the moments that stand out as highlights, either within your personal life or your career?
GARDNER: I'm about to turn 23 in a few weeks, but 20 and 21 specifically were transformative in a negative way. I was very much in the trenches. People say it gets worse before it gets better. It was worse. I guess it's been about three years since I was that age and started contemplating releasing music in a serious way. A lot of what I've learned has just been how to be happy on my own and how to make things work on my own without being dependent on anything else for approval or validation.
The biggest highlight that I felt at the time was when I was still living in New Orleans. [There is] this venue that I was really excited to play and I organized the whole thing with whoever was supporting me on the bill, and I organized all these rehearsals… It was the first time that I was playing a big batch of originals that weren't mostly balanced out by covers. We did an encore that we weren't planning to do because someone had missed one of my songs and they were like, “Get back up there and play it.” It was before I'd even posted “Deny Me” online, so my following was still very small. All of my highlights were just when I felt unified with my community. Every show that I did on Ella Jane, Adam Melchor, and Tiny Habits tours were chock-full of highlights.
I have a very lively Discord server, admittedly. I am so impressed every day with how the community supports each other and how they are uplifting each other and their own creations. [They] are getting through the day giving each other anxiety survival tips, helping each other with college essays. It's crazy how dedicated they are to each other, and most of them have never even met.
LUNA: That’s really sweet. You use the word “community” rather than “fanbase,” and that seems intentional. The level of engagement you have with your community is a phenomenon of this specific time. Were you engaged in fandoms when you were growing up?
GARDNER: (Grimacing) Oh, yes.
LUNA: Was there a time growing up when you were like, “This is what I’m supposed to be doing”?
GARDNER: I studied STEM in college. I studied neuroscience, and I was not pursuing music up until the third year of college, when I was like, “This sucks, and music has always been my dream.” When I was in middle school, I was writing fan fiction for One Direction and 5 Seconds of Summer … I was all up on Wattpad. I [had] one [fan fiction] do really, really well and I had, like, 50,000 followers on Wattpad, which is more than I have now. Insane. Like, good for her. I was just generally really dissatisfied with the way that fandoms were back then. And I think things have definitely changed now to where a lot of communities are really supportive of each other… I've noticed Lizzy McAlpine's community is really great and also really collectively talented.
There are ways to do a fan community right. And I think a lot of that has to do with artist involvement. You're a role model for these people. So you know, if you're out there being mean to interviewers and being mean to fans, then that is going to reflect on the people that listen to you and interact in spaces that were created. [My Discord] is a big community of people who just feel very deeply and are big, big fans of music in general, and they are fans of a lot of artists. I'll hear time and time again that they are really thankful for the way that I and the team of mods on my Discord fostered that community and the way that I am choosing my language when I post to be compassionate towards myself and other people.
A lot of artists, I think, try to get places on self-deprecation, and that's just sad. It's been great getting to study other people. Watching Adam Melcher interact with all of his fans when we were on tour together was so wholesome. He's always on Discord and streaming … doing lives. He has such an excellent relationship with the people [who] listen to his music, and he has also remained a really upstanding person in public and private. So I think when you have a good person making that art then good people are bound to follow.
LUNA: You mentioned growing up and learning how to be happy on your own. You just released “Cleanup Dive,” which may be your happiest and most prolific song yet. It really sounds like a turning point in your writing and the way you approach songwriting. What did that shift feel like? Were you cognizant of it at the time?
GARDNER: Yeah, I was just thinking to myself about this the other day, because I was looking through my Notes app folder of all my finished songs and everything before January, which is around the time that me and Lizzie [Budin] wrote “Cleanup Dive,” and I was like, “Ew.” I was nauseated by all of it. It is so not self-aware. I think in January, I was listening to three artists: Olivia Barton, Madison Cunningham, and Adam Melcher, who I think are some of the most prolific writers of our time, and I think they all bring something different. With Olivia, no one does simple writing like her. She can say something so simple, and I'm like, “I want a knife in my chest right now.” Madison taught me to really care about compositions and has a really artful and almost outlandish way to say basic things. I love her analogies. She does complex in a really, really tasteful way. And I think Adam is really in the middle of those two people — he doesn't have to be too outlandish with his lyrics, and he really cares about his compositions.
Just listening to them on strict rotation, I was thinking so much about the ways that I wrote my own music and how I was putting myself inside so many parameters of, like, this needs to rhyme here and this has to have this many syllables and this structure has to be this. I wasn't really venturing to think about writing and structuring a song in a way that contextually made sense and supported what the song was about. With “Cleanup Dive,” Lizzie and I wrote it to be very few chords and [to] feel very simple in the composition, because it felt like once the realization that we were better hit us, everything was simple, you know?
I tried writing in different methods… I would word dump all of my thoughts on a journal for 10 minutes and then go through, highlight, and see what I could find. I would go through every lyric of a song that was stuck in my head and write my own paragraph that used that as a prompt. I remember doing that with “Emily I’m Sorry” [by boygenius] and crying. Before [January] I had been writing so much about the world and [wondering] why can't I understand other people, and it's because you can't. January was also when I had gotten out of a psych program and written “Cleanup Dive” right after. I obviously had a very refreshed perspective and took a lot away from that program. I realized that it wasn't gonna get me anywhere to write about what's wrong with all y'all. I need to start thinking introspectively. Getting a little happier also helped [the writing process].
LUNA: A little bit of perspective and distance from something definitely aids in the ability to see things clearer.
GARDNER: Yeah, I did not have compassion for myself. When I was going through the things “Deny Me” and all my other songs on that EP are about, I would subconsciously jump at the chance to tear myself down. There are absolutely times when I definitely could have made a better decision over the last several years, but it's once I could step back and gain that perspective. It was a lot easier to have compassion for that version of myself because of the circumstances: the pandemic, first and foremost. Having survived a lot of death and mental illness and just awful world events [within] the last several years and then having to heal from child abuse and trauma through my childhood.
I think it all came to a T when I went off to college. I'm having compassion for that version of myself and understanding why she felt and acted the way she did, understanding her line of logic without being like, “Fuck that.” It was just really helpful. Sorry to be profane. I wouldn't want to hang out with 19-year-old me — I don't think she would enjoy my company. And I don't think I would enjoy her very much, but I’m just having compassion and empathy for where that person was, instead of writing from such a struggling and suffering and suffocating perspective. That was a big change.
LUNA: Totally — it’s important to hold love for the most vulnerable versions of ourselves.
GARDNER: I was a music teacher for a few years, and I really miss that. [I miss] being around kids every day of the week and being so connected to them. The older ones would tell me about their horrible week and how they screwed up all these things. They’d be like, “Grace, I literally don't know how to go on — this is the worst!” Having to do all of the teenage damage control really taught me to have compassion for myself at 16… I did not want to recognize it at the time, but 16-year-olds go through way too much. It really makes me feel for those kids, and then in turn, I realize I can’t be attacking my 16-year-old self anymore.
LUNA: It's a really beautiful perspective to gain. You have an EP coming out soon. Are all of the songs on it written after this super transformative January?
GARDNER: There is one from December that I liked, but other than that, yeah.
LUNA: What sort of themes does this EP explore?
GARDNER: It's called Recovery Mile. I came across that title while scrolling on TikTok. I follow this girl who goes on a lot of runs, and I just like her vlogs. So I'm just sitting around and watching her run — her name is Kate Glavin. I don't run, but she said the phrase when she was at the end of this long run… She said, “recovery mile,” and I was like, “Oh, that’s what it is.”
I've been trying to create a succinct and artful way to say you're on that closing chapter of that version of yourself and you are shedding that and becoming something new very cognitively. It’s kind of the project where I'm tying bows on a couple of things, letting them be where they are — in my past — and then opening the door. “Cleanup Dive” was very much a door-opening song. I felt like shedding old shit and not even relishing the last lap before I'm able to move on to be a new person. I’m just running it as fast as I can and getting it over with because I know that it's worth it.
Where I was in January and February, freshly out of this program and learning how to apply these methods, I learned to control my anxiety, because that's all it was. I was just so anxious about everything. I have really bad contamination anxiety. And I was really terrified about getting sick. I was really terrified about something being in my food — like it was not so much that I was directly damaging my relationships, but indirectly, because people did not want to hang out with someone who was deeply in the trenches like that. I had come out of this program with all of these new ways to handle that and these new ways to invest in myself and the new person I was becoming, and I was really proud of the direction I was heading in and knew that I had to leave a bunch of weight right there if I wanted to stay on track. So it was that last lap of who I was and we're on.
LUNA: Are you still on your “recovery mile”?
GARDNER: I think I finished it back in February or March. I really feel like the letting go point was right when I started doing shows with Adam [Melchor], which was the first week of March. The first show that I did on the Adam tour was in New Orleans, which is where I had started my music career, and so I was like, “Okay, I'm back. Let's do this.” Starting then, I was really empowered. I got home and SXSW had happened, and then immediately after that I was doing some shows with my girlfriend's band — I think I was just on a roll. Not in a way where I was too distracted to recognize the things that were happening, because at the same time my aunt, who I was really close with, was on her deathbed. There were still a lot of not-optimal things in my life that were happening, but I just felt so much more equipped to handle it all and support any new people and any new challenges, and I still very much feel that way. I feel really solidified and really proud of where I am and how I carry myself. I'm not really sure if there's a running analogy to where I am now, because I know in terms of work I'm still running, but in terms of personal development, I'm good. I have my Gatorade, I don't know.
LUNA: You’ve got your electrolytes. You’re fueled.
GARDNER: I think because I've been in such a solid place with myself, the things that have been coming up are things I forgot about in my past and suppressed in my childhood and experiences that are reflection on things that happened at least four years ago. It's a lot of tying up loose ends on things I didn't know to tie up when I was 16. [It has been] a lot of reconciling with and making peace with things that happened so long ago — I had no idea that they were happening at the time. It honestly has been really therapeutic in itself because I know that my inner child would have really needed a song like that. And we know none of our experiences are original at this point.
LUNA: You mentioned your birthday is coming up. What have been your rose, bud, and thorn of this past year?
GARDNER: There are just so many roses, which is great. My last birthday, I was like please for the love of everything good and holy, let this be a good year, because I was clinging on to scraps at that point. I was not well, and my life just completely changed this year. I released my first EP, which I was really proud of. I went on tour for the first time. I moved to Philadelphia. My relationship has been going so wonderfully. There's so little to complain about; I am so thankful for how things turned around. I didn't know that they would change this dramatically. I talked to my girlfriend all the time about how in high school we didn't think that we were the people to deserve this kind of love. We've just been in a really good place. I'm loving life right now.
My bud, I'm really looking forward to releasing this next EP. I'm really proud of it. I think the songs tie together a lot better than my first EP. It felt a little more disjointed on that project, but this one feels a lot better, a lot more connected to each other. So I'm really excited about that and just generally excited to get back out on the road again. I don't have any solid plans, but I am really itching to get out there.
My thorn, I'm not sure… I think it was both a rose and a thorn to move so far away from home for the first time because I had only ever lived in Texas and Louisiana. My folks live in Texas. I had never been too far from them at all. It's been a really transformative experience. I've really loved the city and this area. So I guess that's not even much of a thorn. I think the hardest thing to have happen this year was my aunt passing away. That was back in April, after I'd done a few shows. I was home with my family and got to at least celebrate her life with her, but that is something that still really weighs on a lot of us so much that I haven't been able to get out a song about it. Overall, I can't complain. I know she'd be happy about where I am.
