About the tour
Amazing Grace Presents:
JGrrey (Live)
For JGrrey the past couple of years haven’t been a refresh as much as they have been a complete reinvention. Having first caught the public’s attention with her viral rendition of ‘Don’t Fade’ on the Colors platform in 2017, she went on to rack up millions of streams of breezy and soulful tracks ‘For Keeps’ and ‘Growing’ as well as opening for Billie Eilish on her European tour. This isn’t a story of the global pandemic halting an artist’s momentum, though.
If anything, the enforced pause gave JGrrey the chance to finally reckon with who she was as a person, a partner, a daughter, and an artist. Jen to her friends. It had started to feel like the person and the persona were drifting apart.
It’s been a heavy period of opening up and coming to terms with a set of truths Jen could no longer deny, and one that has set her onto a path of feeling more self–assured than she has been since stepping up to that Colors mic five years ago. “A lot of shit hit the fan and a lot of choices had to be made,” she explains. “I broke up with my ex I came out as queer. My whole fucking life happened to me and I was like ‘If I can’t make the music that feels good to me now, then when can I?’” Jen was left with no choice but to look deep inside herself and see what she was truly made of.
She has slowly realised that, having doubted her abilities for years, she can do it all. “I’m happy to say that I have never been so proud to release music,” she says of the new songs that have been born out of this turbulent period. “It’s something I really needed to make.”
The delightfully brazen future single ‘Boys’ encapsulates JGrrey’s new free–thinking attitude and accepting that maybe for once she isn’t the problem. With the chorus chanting ‘Boys just make you cry, who needs em’, she finds further power in her personal revelations.
The huge amount of upheaval and emotional heaviness left Jen asking herself what motivates her in this new era. Ever since she’d emerged as an artist she says she felt “swept up” as the business of music overtook the love of making it.
As her songwriting got less personal her confidence began to drain. “I was so naive and eager to please that I believed everything I heard,” she says looking back. “I had so much unlearning to do but I can attack things with confidence now.”
Around this time she began taking over more of the responsibility, negotiating her own label and publishing deals, as she carried her personal confidence over into her music career. “I am the happiest I have ever been,” she says now. “Everything I do, people deal directly with me.”
The songwriting changed, too, with that same unlearning process applied to the way she made music. Having written some of her most loved songs as freestyles, JGrrey songs are now a little more considered and fleshed out with rule–breaking encouraged. “I had to figure things out for myself and learn the art of making some shit that sounds cool,” she explains.
Producer Owen Cutts has been there in the studio alongside her while old friend Kojey Radical, who appears on new song “May,” also acted as an inspiration. Ultimately it was a case of reaching a point of knowing that what she was doing sounds good, so therefore it is good.
JGrrey is finally at a stage where pursuing music not only feels good again, it feels
exciting. “I’m excited to carry on and there was a time that I didn’t know if I wanted that,”
she says with now trademark honesty. She knows the next step is writing her debut album, citing storytellers like Biggie, Erykah Badu, and Tierra Whack as rule-breaking inspirations. “When I release my debut album I want to shed light on my experiences and my expectation of life,” she says. “If you listen to it you’d say ‘Yeah, that’s Jen.”
Finally, the gap between JGrrey and Jen has been closed and she has the stories to tell.