Grace Gardner Tackles Awareness in Latest EP, After Knowing
After Knowing, Grace Gardner’s latest EP featuring “Smaller” and “Big Picture,” separates their life into two categories: Before Knowing and After Knowing. Despite their intuition being driven by emotions, they’ve always chased logic and the feeling of understanding. That being said, they rarely find answers in the way they think they will and constantly find themselves jumping through hoops to obtain closure.
Knowing simultaneously gives and takes away. As Grace describes it, “Knowing is experiencing a swarm of questions about a person’s personhood, their motivations, their perspective on the world, only to have an “Aha!” moment of realizing a person I thought was good or could one day be good will never be good.” After Knowing is frustrating, the feeling of blaming your past self for trusting an evil person. “Before Knowing,” Grace adds, “I feel like a person with grit and resilience and a story to tell. I feel my two feet planted firmly on the ground. After Knowing, I look back with remorse, disappointed that I showed my strength to someone who took advantage of it.”
“Something You’re Proud Of (Crime Television)” is the focus of the EP. To Grace, crime television can feel eerily similar to reality. In confronting its realness, Grace was reminded of an unrelenting figure in their past who gave meaning to the difference between Before Knowing and After Knowing. A person they trusted who left a nearly-dead victim in the place of their strength and resilience.
The song opens: "I see you on crime television, always doing your killing under the nose of the suckers who love you most," drawing parallels between fictional psychopaths on TV and the very-not-fictional, particularly the idea of someone feigning innocence, narrowly escaping deserved consequences by acting like a friend. “It’s always been some weak, conniving, un-monster-seeming monster feigning innocence to your face, evading consequences by being your friend.” Now, finally, having that trained eye, Grace finds a safe space to scream and spread good, "cracking your foundation from the ground up".
The idea of the “call-out” floods After Knowing. Many tracks, like “At Your Best” and “Firing Sideways,” are inherently diss tracks, shutting down narcissism by cheekily commenting on insecurities and wrongdoings. A personal favorite is from “Firing Sideways,” My name still lives in your mouth, and it's rent-free, made a home now with wood scraps and a casting couch. Gardner’s cleverly phrased pettiness in songwriting is unmatched and truly comedic relief in otherwise devastating songs.
After Knowing, to its benefit, is sickenly honest, sounding like its very own therapy session. The process of healing is woven throughout it, accepting that feelings and the awareness of them still linger. “This EP was written while I was constantly looking over my shoulder and I'll be working my way out of that for a while,” Grace says, “Maybe there is bliss to be found After Knowing, but I haven’t found it yet.”
Listen to After Knowing below:
