A Chat with Grace Leckey on her Debut Album Best Supporting Actress

Cover art for Best Supporting Actress by Grace Leckey. Photo by Matt Teden.

On June 10, 2022, IU alumni Abe Plaut and Grace Leckey met at a local coffee shop in Bloomington to talk about Leckey’s soon-to-be-released folk and Americana album Best Supporting Actress. The album is now available to listen on music streaming services. The following has been edited for length and clarity:

Abe: Best Supporting Actress, tell me about that title and what it means to you?

Grace: The title is the name of one of the songs, “Best Supporting Actress” and it’s a metaphor in lots of ways. The words “best” “supporting” and “actress” are all really interesting in their own ways. At the core of the meaning for me is basically a metaphor for coming out and dismantling a script you’ve been handed and that you get really good at performing.

The “Actress” part is maybe the easiest to understand the metaphor for. Heteronormativity and living in that world, especially if you’re from either a conservative community or religious community or both. That stacks up to “here are your expectations, here’s your script, perform it and get really good at it and we’ll reward you for it.” 

Grace Leckey tracking vocals in the IU Joshi studio. Photo by Garrett Spoelhof.

“Supporting,” I think is also a great word because instead of just “Best Actress”, “Best Supporting Actress” is finding yourself as a side character. Finding yourself, even casting yourself as a side character in your own story or being cast as a side character, and how that pairs with being an actress instead of an actor. Even just the presentation of all these different binaries at the Oscars is kind of interesting too. What does it mean to be a woman? A femme person in a supporting role everywhere in everything?  And what it means to be really good at playing that role, being rewarded over and over again in small ways and big grand ways for being really really good at what everyone else wants from you. 

It’s a song that starts as an acceptance speech. This person walks on stage and she says “I’m honored to be standing here accepting this award / And I want to thank the academy and Jesus and my fans whom I adore / I’m the best-supporting actress or so I’ve been assured”. And each verse gets a little more off the rails. “I did as I was told and they just filmed and put me on a screen / and they sold tickets with my shame and made millions off of me” is one of my favorite lines from it. It’s about capitalism and so many things. Anyone capitalizing off of controlling women. I grew up in a Catholic church and I still am Catholic and so much of the music is also about that.

The end of the bridge is “I hate how I’ve been treated and I’m ending my career” so it’s the announcement that she’s not going to be an actress anymore, this is the last movie she’s ever going to be in. By the end of the song, she’s talking about how she’s the key piece of dismantling this machine that has taken advantage of her and other women for so long. The feature is her life and she’s going to star in it how she sees fit. That’s the song and the core theme and story of the whole project.

Also shoutout to Garret Fasig who did the string arrangements. He’s brilliant at what he does, and I’m so grateful to him for that.

Abe: Of course, the album right now is not fully out and available to the public so I’m speaking with you about the album without having had the chance to listen through yet. But could you walk me through a track-by-track of people involved in the process and your creative process and storytelling from the songwriter’s perspective?

Best Supporting Actress back cover with names of collaborators listed. Photo by Matt Teden.

Grace: Some of the songs are a couple years old and some of them are very new and were written just a couple months ago. Somewhere in the wintertime I just had an itching on the tips of my fingers. I was like ‘I have to get this out’. I just felt it was time to pull this all together and find all these songs which have been exploring a lot of the themes I talked about, and other ones like growing up, spirituality and relationships and how those all connect.

So I approached Garrett Spoelhof who’s a classmate of mine who also just graduated from the Department of Audio Engineering and Sound Production at the Jacobs School of Music. I was thinking about who I know who would be well suited for a Folk-Americana production instead of pop. It’s not really rock; it’s not jazz or anything that we do a whole lot of at Jacobs, so Garrett was a great fit. I’m grateful every day for him saying yes to collaborate on this with me because he has a wonderful ear and a gentle personality.

Garrett Spoelhoff (Left) and Garrett Fasig at the Russian Recording console. Photo by Grace Leckey.

Garrett was my main collaborator for this project, and he recorded several of the tracks from the album. He recorded main tracks for “Best Supporting Actress” for “Like I Have Lives a Thousand Lives” which is the single that came out already, for “Between Me and the Sun”, for “Sweet Anna” and so much more.

Abe: I know the track “Sweet Anna” has a lot of personal meaning to you. Can you talk about that?

Grace: Sure, “Sweet Anna” is a song I wrote this past fall. I wrote it about this person Anna Doyle who was a grad student, who graduated from the IU Theater Department what would have been just that past spring at that point. She was not a person I knew very well, but I’d worked on a couple productions she was in and knew her name very well. I was always very impressed by her work. When she died, I heard about it over social media and saw it impacting people that I loved in really big ways. And I noticed that my personal reaction to it was just “I don’t know her, I don’t have to grieve her, this is too much”. A few weeks later I was able to identify that feeling and I came back to it and realized that, yes, this is something I’m going to grieve with all these people around me. I turned that thought over-and-over, trying to look at it in lots of different angles and figure out how I was feeling, and how the community was feeling, and what our reaction was to this grief.

Earlier that fall just about a month before Anna died, Rameet Singh who was an audio student died, and they both died by suicide. That just sent really awful waves through my life and the people in my inner-circle, and I really didn’t know what to do with those feelings at the time. I wanted more than anything to support the people around me, and it was through the process of watching this loss felt throughout the community that I realized how important these people are, were, and continue to be for all of us.

I felt like I couldn’t write about Rameet at the time, even though that was the death that impacted me the most and my personal life a little bit more, but “Sweet Anna” came to me in a way that almost felt silly in the metaphor. I thought about how Anna specialized in Shakespearean theater, she was someone who loved lights and sets and costumes, loved language and performance, she loved tradition and changing tradition and the act of bringing something to life. And that reminds me of a Divine Creator bringing things to life for all of us. So I worked with those ideas and wrote “Sweet Anna” which, from the perspective of someone who spends time in a theater and that perspective wondering what it must be like to be in heaven from the perspective of God, a creator, to watch life on earth play out. The lyrics support that same idea. “Tonight she’s in the balcony, box seat shared with God where she watches and she listens for her moments to applaud,” as a way to be a comfort to the people who feel her absence and Rameet’s absence and how they’re still part of our lives.

I’ll also speak on the bridge of this song as well because that’s the part that really makes it not a song in tribute to just one person, but an expression of the complexities of grief. Especially in young people. Especially a community with complex mental health and social needs like a college campus. It’s about questions of blame and guilt left behind when someone dies, and questions of loneliness.

Several of the other tracks were recorded by other classmates of mine at different times. There’s a track “Love From Chicago” that was recorded by Kellie McGrew who is my long-term musical soulmate from the band GraceKellie. There’s another song “Rings” recorded by my classmate Caitlin Pate for their project at school. Then there’s a song “Roses” which was recorded by Carl Newmark who is GraceKellie’s producer and one of my very best friends in the world. That was at a studio called Perennial Sounds in Champaign-Urbana, IL. And we’ve done overdubs on top of all those other things.

Carl also recorded the track “Sundays” which was meant to be a simple interlude. It’s not a power-ballad, it’s not anything like that. It’s really meant to be a sweet little song like a passing thought. I wanted to include “Sundays” firstly because I love the metaphor of Sunday in a Catholic context in a more literal and obvious way. Second, it’s to have a love song with feminine she/her pronouns helps make things obvious. It puts those two things together. I almost wanted to cut it because I didn’t want to have to answer a whole lot of questions about it. But I felt like it was important enough and it’s been really well received so I’m glad that I did include it.

But as a songwriter I’m writing songs all the time and not everything makes the album. Not everything gets released, not everything ever gets shared with anybody. Between the time I wrote the first song on this album in the winter of 2020 and the time where I wrote the most recent song on the album in December 2021, I probably wrote 3 or 4 times the number of songs that are going to be released on this project. Part of the process for me, before I even took it to Garrett was pulling the track list and saying, ‘Which of these are contributing to the story I want to tell and which of these have the right themes?” and also a balance because not everything can break everybody’s heart the whole time.

Tracking strings. From left: KYTE, Alex Hoberty, and Hsin Hou Richard Sun. Photo by Grace Leckey

Abe: You mentioned before about how religious identity and gender influenced your music. Can you talk a little bit about things relevant to you and your personal story that you think people should know?

Grace: I grew up in Arlington, VA which is a suburb of Washington, DC. I’m white and my family is white and we attend a Catholic church called Our Lady Queen of Peace. It has a lot of our family history there, but the church’s own history is interesting too. It’s a historically Black church formed about 75 years ago because it was in a historically Black neighborhood in Arlington and the Bishop at the time refused to give them a church. The nearest Catholic church was in Washington, DC and no one could afford to travel there. It’s a short drive now but at the time it was much harder and presented lots of challenges.

This community of people just came together in someone’s living room, and they ended up having mass in their living room. Then they went to the Bishop and said “If we build a church, if we raise this much money, will you support us” and he said yes, and then didn’t, and it’s this long complicated story. They built this church out of scrap materials from abandoned construction sites. You can even see it in the walls now. Some of it is brick, some is cinderblock, and some is just other stuff and its all been painted over white. So this church has a really interesting history that my parents intentionally picked for me to grow up in with my sister and I’m grateful for that all the time.

I also went to a Catholic school which was different from the church since the church didn’t have a school attached to it but it was really important to my parents that my sister and I grow up in an environment where we learned that God is important. That’s the key to everything they do. I’m not resentful of it and I don’t regret it, not that I had much of a say in it, but that was just my whole world. I didn’t really know anything different. But the truth is no matter what, if you go to a Catholic school and you get to 6th, 7th, 8th grade then they start spewing bullshit.

Abe: I guess with adolescence and puberty comes everything else around our bodies, sex, and sexuality?

Grace: Absolutely. And that was really my first exposure to body, sex, gender, anything. Just this lens of “we’re not really going to talk about it, but all you need to know is sex if for marriage, and marriage is between men and women.” There was a little bit here and there, not really said directly, but teachers were overheard saying things like “well, if we let gay people get married, people are going to want to marry their dogs.” I was only 12 at the time and I didn’t know any genderqueer people, but I knew that something was so not right about this, and I thought these adults in my life were missing something and were wrong.

Lots of shame, and subliminal messaging that since women aren’t priests, women aren’t leaders. The whole process of watching men make decisions that my female teachers, my mother, that I can’t do anything about – that’s not right. I experience femininity within me, and as I grew up, I chose to attend a public high school. So I was more removed from all that, but nothing could undo that damage. Even though I was attending a church saying things from the pulpit like “It doesn’t matter who people love and how they love or what they call themselves” and over the years it’s gotten more explicit saying “genderqueer people, LGBTQ+ people belong and will be loved unconditionally even if the hierarchy of our church demands we don’t.”

I’m 23 now, so it’s been 11 years of me grappling with all of this to get to the point where I can say God made me a woman, which I love being, God made me queer, and I love that. God made me an artist. I love being all these things, and I see femininity like my own in the Divine. That is another key artistic core of what I’m trying to say in all my music. Feminine Divine. It exists and it’s here and really powerful.

Abe: You mentioned one of Garrett’s strengths as a collaborator was his ability to work in folk, Americana, and roots music settings in a way that’s not as baked into the IU Jacobs curriculum. Can you talk about what draws you towards folk and roots music?

Grace: I’m so glad you asked! I grew up playing in a folk choir at Our Lady Queen of Peace. My dad learned to play guitar when he was 40. My mom bought him his first guitar as a birthday present. He learned and took lessons which was cool to watch him learn as I was growing up. And when I turned 11 he taught me how to play. The guitar I have now that the record was recorded on is his guitar that was a gift to me. When he got confident enough in his playing he joined this folk choir at our church that plays every Sunday at 11:15 mass and it is just a weird cast of characters who show up to play with this choir. There’s a couple guitar players, a pianist who doesn’t speak much English, there’s a drummer who plays a collection of hand percussion. Every now and then someone plays trumpet or flute, there’s always some interesting harmonica or something going on! There are harmonies, for sure, but whether or not they’re so tight doesn’t matter. I played a lot of piano and sometimes guitar. My dad might wave me down from my seat in the pew to get me to join in. I know all this music. After some number of years, the music is just a part of you.

So that’s what draws me to folk music, and it took me a long time to figure that out. I used to think that everybody knows folk music, but I realized that’s probably not so true. It’s one of those things where you grow up and move to a different city or go to college and learn that your family isn’t just like everybody else’s family. Some people might know one or two tunes, but I pieced it together that I just know a lot of these songs that are either from Gospel traditions, religious traditions or not. Union and labor songs. I’ve been thinking about songs I know and wondering where I learned them or who taught them to me. I think that in the way a lot of people’s parents gave them their rock albums, my parents gave me folk music. Maybe they didn’t even know that was the tradition they gave me, but they did. It’s the tradition of campfires, of churches working for social change, and it’s the tradition of our family. Is it at Jacobs? No, not really.

Abe: Can you tell me more about the folk choir? Is it mostly sing along, or more of a performance? What is that like?

Grace: It’s maybe easier to say what it’s not. It’s not a worship band. Not like Christian rock, really well rehearsed to make people cry. It’s not a choir really in the way we think of SATB choir. It’s not a traditional religious thing. It’s really more of a sing along. Printing out song sheets and tunes that aren’t part of the usual hymnals. They do a mix of both liturgical music and secular. Songs like “If I Had a Hammer” and “Which Side Are You On?”. Things that people know but might not be in a usual church service.

Abe: Can you talk about the visual presentation of Best Supporting Actress and it’s cover art? It’s a very cool fancy dress photo shoot going on?

Grace: Yeah, we did a photoshoot with pictures taken by Matt Teden and styled by Caitlin Pate. Caitlin is awesome! We went on a whole shopping trip to Louisville to look for dresses that would be just right for what I wanted it to be. At first, I imagined the cover as a full body image of me with the words “Best Supporting Actress: Grace Leckey” as if it were the plaque on the statue of the Oscar. Because that’s what so fun about the title, it’s how the award name would be written. Then we thought the sizing wouldn’t be great, so what about standing still somewhere? What about standing still with a wall of awards behind me? What about something even simpler and just a picture of me accepting the award. The artwork for the single version of “Like I Have Lived A Thousand Lives” is from that same photoshoot as the album cover.

Single artwork for “Like I Lived A Thousand Lives” by Grace Leckey. Photo by Matt Teden.

The single artwork is in black and white which wasn’t our original intention, but it’s meant to resemble old Hollywood and Country music award shows. I’m holding a special ordered plastic replica Oscar statue engraved with my name in front of a black theater curtain with this old vintage microphone to have in front of me. And I’m wearing white gloves, I love this touch so much, with rings and bracelets over top of them inspired by Marilyn Monroe which is cool to have this old Hollywood touch. I love the white gloves, and I kind of wanted to be wearing a white dress because there’s so much religious imagery and old Hollywood in a good white dress. Actresses of the past all knew they would look good in white dresses in a black and white photo, but we ended up finding this purple dress that was just so interesting and engaging. It’s got giant sleeves with ruffles that stand straight up and we played with those a lot. And the purple matched my hair as Caitlin pointed out.

Caitlin pitched that argument to me about owning that color and play off it. There’s something about having died hair that’s a very queer thing to do. Dye your hair a crazy color, and I’m probably not going to have purple hair forever but that’s the phase I’m in right now. And I love the white gloves too because that signals “women in hiding” covering up your arms to the elbows. And the rings over top are stylish and cool, but there’s the song on the album “Rings” with the lyric “I’ve got rings on all my fingers” and it’s a metaphor for growing up like how a tree has rings. A nice nod and little details that are cool and fun to think about. Will people get all of these details? Probably not, but people will pick up on other things that maybe we didn’t even intend to be there but that’s part of putting art out into the world.

Follow Grace on Instagram @leckey_charms and listen to Best Supporting Actress below or on music streaming services.