**Single Premiere & Q&A: Grace Pettis on Songwriting, Her Upcoming Album Working Woman, and Her New Song “Oklahoma”**

11 min readApr 15, 2021

Grace Pettis is an award-winning singer/songwriter based in Austin, Texas. Her songs have been recorded by other esteemed artists, including Sara Hickman and Ruthie Foster, and she also holds down duties as one-third of the Americana/folk-pop trio Nobody’s Girl. Grace’s independent releases have garnered high praise and Working Woman is her much-anticipated debut full album release on MPress Records, out May 7.

“Oklahoma” (OFFICIAL AUDIO)

Grace’s album Working Woman is available for pre-save here and for pre-order on CD and vinyl here.

Q: You’re the winner of many of the nation’s most prestigious songwriting contests, including NPR’s Mountain Stage New Song Contest. Can you share a little bit about your songwriting history?

I’ve been making up songs as far back as I can remember. My parents tell me that I used to toddle around the house singing about whatever I was doing. I was narrating my life musically as soon as I could talk. I guess I never stopped doing that. I started writing the songs down as soon as I learned how to hold a pen. I filled up notebooks as a kid. I started taking it really seriously (as “really seriously” as a 12-year-old can) when I was in middle school.

And then in high school, I picked up a guitar. I’d started writing on piano, but switching to guitar at 15 opened up a whole world of possibilities. Unlike writing for piano, to write a song with a guitar you only needed to know how to play like four chords. And own a capo. It was a revelation. Suddenly I could accompany myself in any key. Guitars are also wonderfully portable. Which meant I could write songs anywhere; not just in the living room, in front of my parents and siblings… where the piano lived.

Once I had a guitar in my hands, I got really obsessive. In college, I started selling CDs for other artists and going to open mics. Anything to learn more and to try my songs out in public. From there, I began entering songwriting contests. NewSong was one of the first. It was a way to see if I was actually any good, or if people were just being nice because they liked my dad’s music. I guess I felt like I needed that- to prove myself. I knew I liked what I was writing. I didn’t know if anyone else would. Then Sara Hickman covered one of my songs. She heard me at an open mic and didn’t put two and two together that I was my father’s daughter (they’re friends from way back) until later. That first songwriting cut and my first few songwriting contest wins gave me the confidence boost I needed to get single-minded about gigging, recording, and treating writing as a serious craft.

Q: What inspired your song “Oklahoma?”

I wrote “Oklahoma” for Rachel Reese. She’s a co-writer, an artist, and she’s become a really close friend. And, obviously, Rachel’s from Oklahoma. When I first met Rachel, she came across as the girl that had it all. She’s… stunningly beautiful. We’re talking movie star good looks. The kind of pretty that you kind of can’t stop looking at. Which is super awkward. But you can’t help yourself because she seems too pretty to be real. Perfect skin and hair. 100-watt smile. It’s misleading because you think somebody that confident and good-looking must have led a charmed life. That’s not the case. The more I got to know Rachel, the more I learned that behind all the joy and friendliness and beauty was a survivor and a fighter; somebody who has been through just about everything and has somehow made it to the other side with a smile. She’s an amazing person. I think the song is also a little bit for the state of Oklahoma itself. Oklahoma is a state full of people like Rachel. There are constant tornadoes. That alone. Like- it’s a fact of life in Oklahoma. Everybody’s ready to head to the basement at a moment’s notice when the sirens go off. And Oklahoma was the last stop on the Trail of Tears. And then there’s the Tulsa Massacre and Black Wall Street… the list goes on. It’s a survivor state. In my experience, there’s just something about people from Oklahoma. Like Rachel. Wildflowers and stampeding buffalo. You know?

Q: What is your songwriting process like in general and what was it like for this song in particular? How about for the album?

I’ll get an idea. Maybe it’s a lyric or a little scrap of a melody that I sing into my phone. If I have time to catch it in the bottle right then and there, I will. But more and more, I only have enough time to get the idea down on paper or to sing it into the phone before I have to finish an email or put away the dishes. But I’ll make time to get that much done when the ideas come. You can’t ignore the muse altogether or she stops coming around. Then, later, I’ll carve out a few hours- as many as four- to work on the song. Sometimes I’m done in twenty minutes. Sometimes it takes all four hours. I never know how much time has actually passed until I’m coming out of it and I look at the clock. Some scraps I save for co-writes. I really love writing with other people too.

Oklahoma came pretty quickly. It came from a conversation Rachel and I had about her background. I started kind of tentatively playing it out and I brought it to an open mic at a songwriting retreat sponsored by the Buddy Holly Educational Foundation. Beth Nielson Chapman was there and I asked her opinion of the song. I knew she’d give me an honest answer. She said she liked it a lot but she pointed out that the verses were written in the third person (“she”) and the chorus used the second person (“you”). She wanted to know why I made that choice. I kind of blinked at her for a minute. I couldn’t come up with a good reason. But I was sort of above it all like, “Songwriting rules are for other people. I’m an artist.” Beth thought I should re-write it, to make the perspectives the same for verses and chorus. At first, I very stubbornly resisted that advice. I said to myself that the song was catchy enough to make up for any technical shortcomings and who cares anyway. But in the end… Beth was right. I re-wrote the song. I was afraid of losing some of my favorite lines in that re-write but it actually all worked out fine. What do you know? I’m grateful to Beth for helping me make the song a lot stronger.

I didn’t really write for the album, per se. I had years and years of songs to choose from. My producer Mary Bragg and I combed through a lot of them. We were looking not necessarily for the best songs but for the right songs. We wanted all of our choices to work together to tell a larger story. Some of the songs we chose were recently written. “Mean Something” and “Tin Can” for example. Others were a lot older, like “Landon” and “Working Woman.” But they all felt like they made sense together.

Q: You collaborated with an incredible team of musicians and featured guests and your album (Working Woman) coming out in May was produced by singer-songwriter Mary Bragg and mixed by 2x Grammy award winner Shani Gandhi. Can you share what it was like working with such an incredible team?

It was heavenly. Mary Bragg is just the best. She’s so good at literally everything. She’s the best singer, the best songwriter, the best producer. And on top of all that, she’s just a very kind human. She has a warm spirit. She makes everyone feel comfortable the minute they walk into the room. You know you should be intimidated but she makes it impossible because she never talks down to anyone. As for Shani, I’ve only communicated with her over email. But she was amazing to work with. She was incredibly patient with all the back-and-forth from mix to mix to the final mix. She never made me feel like we were a nuisance. She was respectful and attentive but also brought her own vision and direction. She took so much care with each song and wasn’t ready to move on until each track was exactly right. I so admire her dedication to the details and her follow-through.

I could go on and gush about literally everyone I worked with on this album. It was truly the dream team.

Q: Can you share any behind-the-scenes details about recording “Oklahoma” and Working Woman?

“Oklahoma” was the first track we recorded. I was nervous that first tracking day. I didn’t know any of the members of the core band except Kira Small (keys, bgvs). They were all from Mary’s rolodex, since we’d decided to track in Nashville at Sound Emporium Studios (I live in the Austin, Texas area). And it seemed like it was going to be hard to get to know the band from behind masks and from six feet away and behind the massive wall of nerves and angst that I brought in with me. Just all that general heaviness of the summer of 2020. It felt like a lot to overcome to get to a good recording. I went to my little isolation booth and the band tuned up. And then, from that very first downbeat… I knew everything was going to be ok. We “found” the song quickly. It all just fell into place organically and easily. Mary did a great job of just putting the right people in the room. That moment was euphoric. I was so thrilled to be playing music again with other humans, even if it was a little different with the Covid safety. It didn’t negate any of the joy. In fact, even the negative energy I brought with me to the session turned out to be just something I could channel and use. So that was a pretty great discovery. I think we all felt that way, a little. We really didn’t know what to expect. Everything was so weird. But “Oklahoma” was so fun and so easy to track. It really set the tone for the rest of the session. I suspect that’s why Mary planned for us to track it first.

Speaking of channeling even the negative energy I brought with me to the session, I definitely did that for “Working Woman.” I wanted that vocal to have a ton of confidence and swagger, even. So I just kind of tapped into all my post #Me-Too, Trump-era, 2020 defiance, frustration, and rage. And I think I found it. There’s a scream that happens at the end of the track that was kind of… primal? In that moment. That’s really the only word for the way it felt to sing that note. “Cathartic” I guess is another word for it.

Q: From a songwriting perspective, what does Working Woman aim to say?

When we were combing through songs in the early stages of pre-production, my producer Mary Bragg and I were looking for songs that were both autobiographical and also that spoke to the multi-faceted experience of being female in this country. That was the relatively ambitious goal we set for ourselves.

With so few women represented in every aspect of commercial music, from production to performance, songwriting, and engineering, we’re just not hearing women on our radios. And the few women’s voices we do hear are basically all in their 20s, white, and straight. There is an enormity of the human experience that we are missing out on in our culture. And that truly bothers me. So with Working Woman, we tried, as much as it is possible with one artist, to express the complexity of what it feels like to be a girl and a womxn in this country.

Of course, that has to start with the personal, because the only vantage point I have to talk about being a womxn is my own. So there are coming of age songs; songs about growing up and making sense of being a girl in the world, songs that celebrate the female experience, and songs that get real about some of the struggles. But I’m straight, I’m white, and I’m in my early 30s. And I haven’t experienced most of my life. So my own story is the starting place but it’s not the whole story.

And we knew that although the album had to be autobiographical and personal, and although we wanted it to be those things (especially as a debut of sorts, since it’s my first album with MPress), stopping with my own experience wasn’t going to accomplish what we wanted to, artistically.

So, Working Woman became equal parts artistic statement and activism. I felt like it wasn’t enough to just write something about the multifaceted experience of growing up female in the south, in this country. The best way I could express that was to actually enlist the creative talents and different voices of other womxn.

We had another goal, more activism than art, which was to prove once and for all that great music can be made without a single man in the room. It’s something I hope most people already believe, but Mary and I couldn’t think of a single record where all the credits were womxn. And because one didn’t exist, we knew we had to make one.

Q: What artists have inspired your songwriting? Who are you listening to currently?

So many. Everybody from Lauryn Hill to Tom Petty to the Indigo Girls. I listened to R&B, folk, country, and jazz growing up. That’s what I was drawn to. Right now I’m listening to a lot of David Ramirez. I feel that I have a lot to learn from him, as a writer. I’m also really digging the new single from Allison Russell. I’m so excited for her new solo album and getting to hear her story put to music. She’s such a beautiful person. And have you heard the latest Amythyst Kiah track? Holy shit. It’s SOOO good. “Black Myself.” Our Native Daughters did a version of it, which was great. But I love her solo version. It rocks so hard.

Q: Who would you most like to co-write with?

Dolly. I mean, a lot of people. But… it’s got to be Dolly.