Grace Cummings is a walking contradiction — the kind who thinks cowboys are unicorns and language is just a nuisance that gets in the way of a good song. “Sometimes the words are just a vehicle for the melody,” she sighs, like it’s the most obvious truth in the world. And for her, maybe it is. Ramona, her new record, hums with the ghosts of big, cinematic heartbreak — built on cavernous strings, devastating drums, and that voice. That impossible voice.
“I wanted to do something this big and grand and theatrical,” she says, still sounding a little stunned that she pulled it off. After two albums that felt “small” — one a scrappy fluke, the other shackled by Melbourne’s lockdowns — Cummings swung for the canyon walls this time. Literally: she packed up her bruised songs and headed for Topanga Canyon, where Jonathan Wilson answered her cold-call dream pitch in half an hour. “I got this wave of confidence out of nowhere,” she says. “And then I thought it wasn’t real. But it was.”
She’d already written nearly everything — in her bedroom, at her piano — save one track, Love in the Canyon, the obvious accidental child of California nights. But it wasn’t just the new geography that cracked things open — it was trusting people who knew how to make her bigger. “Sometimes you’ve got to work with other people and they make you better at being you,” she says. Drew Erickson’s string arrangements took her hummed voice memos and turned them into sweeping, heart-gutting crescendos.
And that voice — that singular weapon — found a new way to bleed. “Vulnerability came from being really true,” she says. “Not trying to make something that was good because it would impress this person, or get kudos from that person. No filter.”
On Ramona, Cummings’ cowboys roam like mythical beasts — the Common Man and Work Today and Tomorrow drifting from desolate plains to dusty barrooms where you’re just as likely to find a god behind the sun as a cheap bottle of bourbon. “Cowboys may as well be unicorns to me,” she says. “They represent freedom — stuff you don’t feel, that you don’t think you’ll ever feel.”
And about those big, sprawling scenes, she wants every song to sound like it belongs in the climax of a film that rips you open. “Real things in life are best expressed theatrically,” she insists. And what about the king who keeps showing up? “It’s just the biggest word I can think of,” she shrugs. “Whoever’s up there, looking down behind the sun.”
Ask her if she bothers with backstories for her characters and she’ll practically roll her eyes. “Actors spend all this time sitting around thinking about their backstory — just get up and do it!” she laughs. “Your backstory is you. That’s all you’ve ever got.”
So here’s Grace Cummings: voice like a cathedral, words like a puzzle, every song a little universe where unicorns and cowboys exist side by side — and maybe they ride each other off into some mythical horizon. “Sometimes the words get in the way,” she says. If you want to know what she really means, just listen.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
