Oriunda de Devon, Grace Gillespie é uma artista e produtora que se fixou em Londres. Em 2019 editou o seu primeiro EP “Pretending” e, este ano, apresenta-nos o seu sucessor “After The Harvest Moon“.

This song is about turning 28 and the strange expectations I held about this particular year in my life. I was born when my mother was 28 and for a long time I thought this year in my own life would be significant – perhaps I would have children, or at least we would celebrate this year in which I was exactly half mum’s age. In reality I spent the year realising that I was suffering from all-consuming anxiety, followed by lockdown in which I couldn’t see my family at all – not an easy year and definitely not how my elaborate imaginings had envisioned it. However, I still feel that overall the song is positive: there always will be a right time but holding grand expectations for things in the future is always going to be a dangerous game.

I wrote this song in the boiling heat in France and its energy is full of wine and sunshine and heat haze. The song is about life and death, inspired by all the small creatures I swept, dead, from the floor or trawled out of the pool. The whole place was buzzing with life… but also with death. It really spelled the cycle of time out to me.

This is a dark, inward looking song about the power of the mind and how breathing can make you feel terrifyingly alive. In fact, it’s all that is keeping you alive. I think I got into a little bit of a cycle of thinking about it all too much – and much in the same way that if you try to think about how you walk too much, it becomes difficult and unnatural.

This is by far the most joyous of the five songs. It’s about moving on and seasons changing but love remaining! Of course it’s very inspired by my hero Neil Young. I guess I was thinking along the lines of: after the harvest, when all of the summer riches have gone and it’s cold and dark… what is left? And what is left is what you hold in your mind, so I try to hold love in mine.

A song for another of my heroes. My parents gifted me a book about Nick – and although I already knew the story, it broke my heart again. Reading the detail of the end of his days, his struggle to get down to London to record, and the constant feeling that he couldn’t convey the message he felt he needed to convey, resonated with me – it still does, and I think it always will. I wrote the song in about 20 minutes after reading the book once more, a little homage to people whose words have struck me in a profound and lasting way.