Gracie Abrams review: Californian popstar showers fans with love at 3Arena in Dublin
A recent picture of Gracie Abrams, who played at 3Arena in Dublin on Monday. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images)
★★★☆☆
In a touching moment on Monday night, Gracie Abrams leans down to accept a poster from a fan. It shows a beautiful young girl with Abram's lyrics about missing someone emblazoned across it.
“She’s my best friend,” the fan cries, “she had tickets for tonight.” Abrams lowers her mic for a few moments to speak directly with the fan, with snippets audible as her doe eyes widen and she brings her hand to her heart.
“I am so sorry for your loss... thank you for bringing Lolly with you," she says as she brings the mic back to her mouth and places the photo front and centre of her B-Stage, designed to mimic the setup of Abram’s own bedroom.
In the same space, she accepts a book of letters from fans, looks for her “new friend Eoghan” in the crowd whom she met earlier in the day at Dublin's Loose Canon wine bar, accepts multiple phones to take selfies with fans, and takes out her own Polaroid camera to ask if she can take some pictures of us for herself.
Abrams' fans lap up the full-on love fest. They wear a bow for every friendship bracelet the Swifties had last year. Fans whom Abrams refers to throughout the night as "friends" and who sang every single word of Abrams' self-confessional, diaristic discography with gusto and heart. Abrams' relatability is her trademark, which is particularly intriguing given her background.
The daughter of film royalty (JJ Abrams of fame), girlfriend to local boy done good Paul Mescal, and Taylor Swift’s appointed protégé, Gracie Abrams has been given a platform many young singer-songwriters can only dream of.
When the Californian released her debut album in February 2023, it came just weeks after a viral cover story from Labelled, ‘The Year of the Nepo Baby’, it zeroed in on the number of rising stars in the cultural landscape who are sons and daughters of influential industry people and started a conversation that, naturally, asked the question - have they the pedestal they've been granted?
And so, Abrams came out the gates with a mark on her back. Many felt she was a kind of "manufactured" singer-songwriter, one that had modelled herself on Swift and, somewhat ironically, Mescal's former beau Phoebe Bridgers.
Mescal, by the way, isn't mentioned at all on stage on Monday night, but members of his family are in the audience, and there is a wry smile from Abrams when she sings the line, '"It's a normal thing to fall in love with movie stars".
was a poor opening for the album the tour gets its name from, and it's an even poorer opening for an arena show. Thankfully, it's quickly followed by and all of which feel joyful live and given extra gusto by a full-band on stage.
After that, the show does feel to plod along. Bar three solo tracks on the B-stage, the whole show is performed from a fairly bland stage set-up. She doesn't interact with the band, spending most of her time just moving left to right, bending down to wave at various sections of the crowd.
Compared to the huge productions employed by Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter recently at the same venue, Abrams is largely left to her own devices with her voice and her guitar. That might have worked when she was uploading videos to Zoom in the pandemic and growing an audience on TikTok, but for an arena, perhaps she needs the extra bells and whistles.
The end of the night brings two of the show’s most euphoric moments in the form of and (The former returned to the number one spot on the Irish Singles Chart this week, making it the longest-running hit by a female artist in the charts' history at 12 weeks).
It remains to be seen whether she can hit the heights of her aforementioned peers, but these final moments at 3Arena are a sign of what Abrams can do when she’s at her best.
