By Stevie Connor.
Rising singer-songwriter Ciara Grace has announced the release of her eagerly awaited debut album, Write It Down, available across all digital platforms May 10, 2024.
Written by Grace and co-produced alongside 2x GRAMMY® Award-winning producer/engineer Glenn Barratt (Melody Gardot, Shirley Ceasar), Write It Down is highlighted by the stunning new single, “Lost Cause".
“I wrote this album over the course of three years when I was going through high school,” says Ciara Grace, “which I feel is a very tumultuous time in anyone’s life. Experiencing your first taste of adulthood, your first relationships, trying to discover who you are as a person – it’s all very overwhelming, exciting and terrifying at the same time. Through all these experiences, I was really just writing down how I felt as a way to cope and to process things, hence the title track, ‘Write it down.’ I have no plans to stop writing songs and making music, I’m just hoping people will relate to the experiences I’ve written about.”
Ciara Grace has been surrounded by music since day one. Growing up just outside of Philadelphia, she spent much of her childhood with her dad, Glenn Barratt, at his MorningStar Studios in East Norriton, PA, or backstage at top East Coast clubs, listening rooms, and international stages with her mom, acclaimed singer-songwriter Lizanne Knott.
And as you will hear, she learned her lessons well.“I was always running around, making friends with the musicians, pressing buttons I shouldn’t have been touching,” Grace says. “On another note, I was very fortunate growing up that I got to sit in on my mom making her albums. I feel like I got the artist’s perspective from her, and the engineer’s perspective from my dad. By the time I got around to starting my debut, I was very familiar with the process and all the time and labor that goes into it.”
With inspiration everywhere, Grace began penning her own songs, fuelled by her passion for eclectic and expressive artists like Lorde, Fiona Apple, and Lucy Dacus but rich with her own particular life experience and growing gift for seasoned songcraft. Little by little, she developed her evolving catalogue both in the studio as well as on global stages spanning the Philadelphia Folk Festival and New York City’s legendary Bitter End to the Liverpool Philharmonic's Music Room and Bilbao Spain’s Sala BBK. Co-produced at MorningStar with Barratt, songs like the buoyant “Summer Interlude” and the edgy “Stalker” are finely hewn and deeply personal, Grace’s intimate, emotionally charged lyricism spun with empathy, tight-knit arrangements, and understated invention.
A lifetime in the making, Write It Down now sees Ciara Grace truly carving out her own unique space, affirming her among her generation’s most compelling and authentic new singer-songwriters.Grace will celebrate the long anticipated arrival of Write It Down with a wide range of live dates.
Of the song Ciara tells us, "I wrote "Lost Cause" about a boy I met in detention. He was awful and bad for me and I could spot it from a mile away, but I had a lot of fun writing about it. For a while this was my favourite song on the album, I absolutely love how it turned out with this kind of reggae beat and stacked harmonies to give it a sort of haunting edge. It’s just everything I wanted it to be. Although it’s a relatively low-key song compared to the rest of the album, I think it’s one of the catchiest and I knew when I wrote it that I wanted it to be a single. All in all, I feel like it’s a good gateway song into the rest of the album. I was sixteen/seventeen when I wrote these songs, and making awful romantic decisions with acute self awareness was kind of my thing".
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