When Rachel Grae sits down to talk about her upcoming Lollapalooza debut, she’s surprisingly composed. The singer-songwriter from New Jersey just wrapped her first television appearance on Chicago’s WGN, and in a few hours she’ll hit the stage at one of the country’s biggest music festivals. Most young artists would be fueled by adrenaline or lost in last-minute rehearsals, but Rachel is different. She speaks with confidence even as everything around her feels new.
“For something like this I like to be in the best shape I can possibly be in holistically, physically, emotionally, and vocally,” she says. “Confidence building is the way I prepare for these things. I allow myself to control what I can and let go of the rest.”
At 23, Rachel is carving out her own space in the music world. From viral TikTok moments to Times Square billboards, her upcoming album Turned Into Me is a meditation on growth, identity, and the messy process of becoming who you’re meant to be. Rachel tells me she grew up as the creative outlier in a decidedly non-musical family; the left-handed “dreamer” in a house of practical right-handers. “Nobody in my family makes music, sings, or is even remotely creative,” she says. “I was just told I was an oddball my whole life.”
When she was 12 Rachel asked to record covers in a studio as a birthday gift. “I was always obsessed with the idea of recording music,” she says. “But I also knew I wanted to go into a space of helping people. When I was younger I thought I would go into therapy or psychology to pursue that. Once I put a pen to the paper I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is how I’m going to help people.’”
By her senior year of high school, Rachel had found her rhythm posting YouTube covers every Tuesday. “That’s how my manager Michael Morrison found me. We first met at a local restaurant called Ritz Diner.”
When Michael asked if she had performed, written songs, or played instruments before, Rachel’s response was an unequivocal “no” to all three. Her father mentioned she kept a lyric notebook and would sing melodies that came to her. “I truly thought that was the equivalent of having songs stuck in your head, except all the songs were mine,” Rachel says. “I was just creating random melodies.”
Her parents surprised her with her very own keyboard the next day. “I bawled my eyes out like I had just won a Grammy when I saw it,” she says. Music soon became her daily practice, with self-imposed schedules starting at 7AM and hours spent crafting chorus after chorus after school.
During those years, Rachel was also soaking up musical influences. Adele for vulnerability, Amy Winehouse for soul, Julia Michaels for her ability to turn heartbreak into conversational hooks. The timing aligned perfectly with the start of 2020, allowing her to squeeze in co-writing sessions in Los Angeles just before the pandemic hit. Her breakthrough arrived in 2021 with the release of her single “Bad Timing,” a song that would put her face on one of Times Square’s largest billboards.
“By the end of the album I truly felt like I healed my inner child. I also felt like I was manifesting who I want to be.” -Rachel Grae
She kept the momentum going with “Outsider” and “Friend Like Me,” the latter born from a TikTok moment in her kitchen. Rachel was cooking eggs and casually improvising a melody when she realized she had stumbled onto a hook that could become a song. The clip went viral and eventually turned into one of her breakout singles. Her first full-length album Journal No. 1 arrived in 2024, a compilation of songs tracing her journey from teen dreamer to emerging artist.
As Rachel prepares to release her second album Turned Into Me this fall, she says it represents a significant evolution from her debut. Where she defines her first album as a scrapbook of songs written since her teens, this one has a clear design: alternating tracks that explore who she was versus who she’s become.
“Every other song, it’s who I was, who I am, who I was, who I am, on the same topic,” she says. Creating that duality required deep self-examination according to Rachel, especially on her track “Safe with Me,” which emerged from a “therapy session” with co-writers Joe Janiak and Dave Gibson.
“Dave made me get to the bottom of what I wrote about, and that’s what really made it emotional,” she says. “The production led with the conversation first and how it made us feel. ‘Safe With Me’ is one of the most vulnerable songs I’ve ever written.”
The song digs into people-pleasing and self-sacrifice, themes that run through the entire album. “For a part of my life I tried to protect everybody else until I got to a point where I thought, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know who I am. I’m just making everybody else happy, but who am I?’”
Rachel says Turned Into Me is more mature, soulful, and organic than her debut album. The sound reflects her current mindset: less focused on sadness, and more on independence and self-worth. “I’m such a preacher of independence, feeling powerful, and feeling empowered by who you are without having anybody else do that for you,” she says. “By the end of the album I truly felt like I healed my inner child. I also felt like I was manifesting who I want to be.”
Sonically the record leans into R&B grooves, country storytelling, and isn’t afraid to throw in a horn section when the song calls for it. “I centered this album around how the songs make me feel rather than trying to box myself into one category this time,” Rachel says. “I didn’t think about how I’d be perceived, what lane I needed to stay in, or what kind of playlist I needed to make. I just wrote it for myself.”
Part of that growth came from switching up her listening habits while writing. Instead of sticking to mainstream pop, she discovered artists like Olivia Dean, Teddy Swims, and Raye.
“Funny enough, there are actually 11 songs on the album, and ten of them were written one right after the other on the same day,” she says. “One song got cut and I rewrote it, but everything else came together in a single day because the whole project was so planned out. When we wrote one side of the album, we already had a clear idea of what the other side would look like.”
When she’s not making music, Rachel stays firmly planted in creative spaces. She’s passionate about fashion, particularly streetwear with a New York edge. “I love fashion. That’s a huge thing that I’m into, so anytime I can just roam the streets and people watch and look at fashion, that’s a big thing,” she says. She gravitates toward brands like Off-White and Ottolinger but is equally likely to hunt for vintage pieces at thrift stores, always favoring baggy jeans and pants.
With Lollapalooza on the horizon, Rachel is keeping things simple. Family and friends will be in the crowd, her voice is ready, and her band is tight. She says she’s manifesting a successful headlining tour and to keep growing the community she’s built with her fans.
“I feel like a different version of me is birthing with this album,” she says.
A version of this article originally appeared in Sixtysix Issue 15.
