Grace Cummings Won't Tell You What She Means

By Dani Blum


Grace Cummings makes songs that sound like she’s ripping them raw from her throat. The Australian singer-songwriter wails and howls and shudders; this is intense, elaborate folk music that seems physically taxing, as if she’s fighting to drag each ragged syllable out of her mouth. Her voice is the main event. There’s a urgency inherent in her shaking vocals, the sense that, between lyrics about Stetson hats and Townes Van Zandt, she is desperately attempting to tell you something. Yet any time asked what any of the lovely, lilting songs on her new album, Storm Queen, actually mean, she refuses to answer. “Good try,” she says with a laugh.


Over a Zoom call from Australia, Cummings looks at the carpet and the dark studs of polish on her nails. A guitar leans against the wall next to her. A knot of hair trembles above her forehead any time if she giggles. It’s morning in Melbourne, the city that’s had the strictest coronavirus lockdowns in the world, and the government is grappling with another wave of restrictions because the Omicron variant surges. Cummings seems tense, folded on a chair, some days pressing down absent-mindedly on the tattoo of a rose blooming on her bicep.


It’s not that there’s no backstory to Storm Queen, she notes — the themes and through-lines are clear to her, however those connections are so intensely personalized that only she might would make them. She wants the record to resonate with people in back of her intentions or scope. “The things that I like about all of the music that I love is that, if it’s good, it sounds like it’s written just for me,” she says. All art is like that, she believes, or should be.


Cummings released her first official album, Refuge Cove, in 2019, nevertheless she considers Storm Queen to be her real debut. That previous record was more a number of songs she’d pieced with each other soon after Eric Moore from Australian indie label Flightless Records and the psych musical group King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard reached out; he asked if she had an album, and she sent in an audience of songs. Storm Queen, out today (January 22), is the only project she crafted intentionally as a cohesive record, a prospect she noticed more energizing than pressured. She describes the writing process as “like a little bit wave,” tracing an idea up until she finds its center.


Cummings doesn’t have a process for getting her voice to the staggering, stunning tone that comes through in her songs, perhaps most notably on “Heaven” and “Freak.” The studio environment feels organic to her, she says, and she tries to minimize the thoughts in her head as she records, taming her impulse to analyze. She centers on completely inhabiting a feeling. There’s no structure to her songwriting process, either – “I’m really not good at, and some days pretty fiercely against, attempting to get something out that isn’t there,” she says. “Or attempting to brilliant something. Unless it’s happening, it’s not going to happen.”


She doesn’t begin with emotions in her songs; emotion is what comes soon after everything else, she says. She thinks and writes in images, and chases the feeling that follows. On Storm Queen, several of these images revolve around cowboys, like the Stetson hats in “Heaven” and the nation tune she alludes to in “No Time for Dying.” “What a cowboy is to me is basically what a unicorn is to me,” she says. “It’s this magical creature, this thing that nobody actually is. It’s a picture of freedom, getting on your horse and just fucking riding.”


It’s not a coincidence that she became so enchanted with that picture of freedom. She doesn’t classify the record as a “pandemic album” — “I don’t really wish to give the pandemic any more fucking attention,” she jokes — although she wrote most of the songs throughout lockdown not long before she recorded the project. She kept tweaking the lineup subsequently, stashing five songs here, adding others there. She wrote the title track about a week before recording; at her shows, she likes playing songs that are fresher, any time the meaning still reverberates. Some of the songs were composed soon after brush fires swept through Victoria, just before the pandemic set in. The sky was gray; the air felt boiling hot. She couldn’t go outdoor as the smoke was so thick. Looking out the window in front of her piano, she felt divorced from reality. “It was like I wasn’t a piece any sort of world that was real,” she says. “It was just much. As well as also boring.”


The real world, the organic world, has long been a comfort for her. She grew up because the youngest three kids, with more than a few imaginary companions, collecting gum leaves and rocks out of the garden. Her mother would hear Grace wake up at 3 a.M. And converse with her variety of foliage and stones. She listened to Neil Young and Bob Dylan and The Beatles; any time while she was 8, she painted her bedroom wall with lyrics to “Here Comes the Sun” and “I Am the Walrus” next to a peace sign. She used to lie under a blanket-covered table in her room and listen to music, writing the lyrics she heard on the underside of the table. It was a way to stake her claim on the songs she loved, saving little scraps that felt like they were just for her.


years prior, Cummings seen a van Gogh painting at an exhibit and felt it was also made for her. She knew that it was from the artist’s doctor, the swirled strokes forming a male slouched over a table in despair, nevertheless she felt such a connection to the artwork, the exhaustion, pity, and pleading in the doctor’s eyes. “The look in his eyes is like, ‘Come on, Vincent,’” she says, her voice heavy. “It was almost like he was saying to me, ‘Come on, Grace.’” She stood in front of the painting for 45 minutes, she says, unable to walk away from the desperation frozen on the canvas.


That sense of anguish reverberates while in Storm Queen. “What do you write about if it’s not pain and pleading and love and death and all that shit?” She asks. There really are moments on the record whenever the emotion cracks through and overpowers. She recorded the title track last, and finished writing it five days before; “I wanted it to be really ugly and quite jarring,” she says. She captured the opening take survive with a guitar player and brought in a saxophone player. As he played, Cummings sat on a stool and watched him. “I just lost my mind,” she says. “I had this thing in my head While I was writing it, and I described to him how I wanted him to play and what I wanted it to feel like, and he just did it so perfectly.”


She did not remember that her mic was still on, and she began laughing because she was so thrilled with the sound. On the last track of album, in case you listen closely enough, you could hear the musical group whooping as she finished the take; she only realized that as she played the record over and over again throughout combining and mastering. She doesn’t know how to describe the experience of listening to her songs over — “I’m sure there’s a German word for it,” she jokes — yet the sensation of reaching back to a past self haunted her. She might chart her growth in the recordings, the progress she’s made. She thinks she’s getting better with saying what she means.