Gracie and Rachel and Marissa Nadler Feel At Home Together

Gracie and Rachel are Gracie Coates and Rachel Ruggles, a duo originally from the Bay Area and currently based in Brooklyn; Marissa Nadler is a musician based in Nashville. Gracie and Rachel joined Marissa for a stretch of her tour of last month, and just after they parted ways, the three got on a call to catch up about post-tour blues, on-the-road rituals, and Gracie and Rachel’s new record If We Could, Would We — out now on Righteous Babe Records.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music 

Gracie Coates: Hi! Can you see me and hear me OK?

Marissa Nadler: Oh, my god, yeah. You look fab in your cape. 

Rachel Ruggles: A hundred, across the board.

Marissa: Are you still in California? You both look great.

Gracie: We’re in Cali. We just went sailing on the water of the Bay near the Golden Gate Bridge. Our friend has a sailboat and it was magical. Where are you?

Marissa: I’m at a Holiday Inn Express in Washington state. I’m jealous that you guys are sailing and resting.

Gracie: I know. Don’t you feel like your days off make you more tired sometimes?

Marissa: Yes. In fact, Milky [Burgess, Marissa’s collaborator] hates days off. But I’m just gonna wash my hair and all that kind of stuff.

Rachel: Do you have to make movements anywhere today? Or are you staying in the same place?

Marissa: Besides this, I’m gonna just stay here… I’m on my phone right now, so hopefully it stays connected. I don’t know if you remember in San Francisco, my laptop fell out of its case and totally broke.

Gracie: That’s so hard to have happen on tour when you can’t deal with anything.

Marissa: Anyway, let me start this off formally: how do you guys stay grounded when we’re getting dressed in cars and doing makeup in the minivan and there isn’t this really comforting backstage? Because it’s hard to get show-ready and grounded. 

Gracie: Such a good question. It was really nice to see you and Milky’s flow too, because it was reminding me of ours. Just also being in a duo, you play your different roles; you have him doing this while you’re doing that, and there’s a flow that is really nice that we know each of us is going to take on, down to, “Alright, we’re two hours out from the venue. Gracie, you start looking at the menus for where we’re going to eat,” and I’m going to read it off to Rachel and we make it a fun guessing game of which one we’re going to choose. And then I know that Rachel’s going to be in touch with front of house or figuring out what our load in is. There’s just these small things that make us feel really safe because it’s so the same every night, even though it’s different. Especially when we’re on a run like with you, that each night is the same timing, and we know your flow now — just having our roles really distinguished is, I think, really nice.

Marissa: So Gracie finds the restaurants and Rachel picks out of the choices?

Gracie: I’ll look around for restaurants and then Rachel’s very particular about menu items, so I’ll go through and read them off and she has to decide before we get there. Because if she decides when we get there, it’s never going to happen. [Laughs.] 

You said that you guys, every town you go through, you look up the history of the town. That’s a really nice thing to do, just to get you feeling connected to where you’re going. 

Marissa: Yeah. When I was younger, in my early years, I think I took for granted how cool it is to get to travel for a living. I think some of those early experiences were lost on me, like being in Greece before we even had cell phones and calling my parents from calling cards and using MapQuest directions. I started touring in my early 20s, before everybody had cell phones. So nowadays when we go places, even if it’s the randomest place, I will look up the whole history because it becomes a learning experience. Like, I learned that people in Eugene, Oregon, are known to not use umbrellas because they like to feel the rain on their body.

Gracie: I love that so much, it probably will work itself into a lyric one day. I remember you learned something in one town we were in and you were telling the sound guys, and they were really excited because they were like, “I didn’t know that!” It was something about ducks…

Do you guys have rituals on the road, outside of the Wikipedia thing, that feel grounding?

Marissa: This is kind of a nerdy answer, but I finally realized how to hot spot my phone to my computer, so I have almost like a moving office. While Milky’s driving most of the way, I will do my email so I don’t feel like I’m falling behind. Or at least I used to be, before I dropped my laptop. But that was nice while it lasted, to be able to stay on top of stuff. I talk to my parents almost every day.

Gracie: I love that.

Marissa: That’s pretty grounding to me. I think as you get older, your circle gets smaller and smaller, at least for me, intentionally so. Quality over quantity. 

Gracie: We do that too. Whoever’s driver gets to call their parents. Then the other person will be with their hotspot laptop catching up on emails or advances or doing social media posting. 

Rachel: But usually, I choose music over phone calls. Gracie’s the phone talker and I like to listen to albums. And I make a lot of playlists, for different moods and different energy flows.

Marissa: Do you have a go-to driving record from start to finish, or ones that you kept gravitating towards?

Rachel: It’s really mood based for me. On this last run, I was very excited to hear the new James Blake record. 

Gracie: And you do ANOHNI a lot. 

Rachel: I do. And then there’s The Black Angels — I love this band, and I listen to them driving because it has a lot of push behind it and it gets me going. That first record, I think it’s called Passover, I listened to that top to bottom many times driving.

Marissa: Do you find it hard to stop touring? Do you get the post-tour blues?

Gracie: I do, I get really sad sometimes. 

Rachel: Are you feeling sad right now, Gracie?

Gracie: It’s interesting, this time I’m not feeling sad. I wanted to keep going with you guys, but I think there’s something about — well, first of all, we got to end it in our hometown, so being with our families, it’s kind of a different feeling. We’ve never ended a tour perfectly in the Bay. It’s been kind of a magical feeling where we got to really land in our childhood bedrooms. 

Marissa: Get some home cooking.

Gracie: Yeah. I think that’s distracted me. Because if we ended in, you know, St. Louis, Missouri, or something, we’d be like, “OK, now we’re back to our real lives.” I think we’d feel it more. But right now we get this little cushion. But I do feel sad. But I feel the saddest when we don’t have more touring on the books, which we do right now. When you don’t know what that is, existential dread sets in, for me at least.

Rachel: “What am I doing next?”

Gracie: “What is life? Do we have to make music again? Should we do it now? Do we write a record?” Rachel was just saying yesterday, we’re feeling really good right now because our record isn’t out and it’s about to be, and the moment you release a record, everybody is like, “So, when are you writing another record?” We’re so grateful to live in this moment.

Marissa: The speed at which you’re forgotten is unbelievable. I had a record come out six months ago, and that’s like an eternity in the business. Already I’m just like, Shit, I gotta get working on something else. I mean, this tour has been so long that I don’t have any dates after this one ends yet, but I’m already talking to the European booking agent like, “Let’s go here!” Because it is a scary feeling when you look at the tour date website page and there’s nothing there. 

Are you going to have a front of house on this next run?

Gracie: We’re just talking you about that. It would be ideal, but we have to figure out what we can manage.

Marissa: Yeah. This tour, the variables from sound tech to sound tech has been a real make-it-or-break-it each evening for me. So I’m definitely saying to myself, This is the last tour I do without a front of house and in-ear monitors. Because it doesn’t matter how good it sounds in the house, if it doesn’t sound good up on stage, it can really alter your experience and performance.

Rachel: Absolutely. A lot of people often ask me, “What do you get most nervous about?” And I get nervous the most nervous about two things: soundcheck, and then if I am going to enjoy the show. Because if I don’t enjoy the show, then honestly, I don’t want to say hi to anybody, I have a hard time pretending, “Oh, that was amazing.” I’ll literally go on a monologue, like, “That was horrible. And then that’s taking away from their maybe excellent experience. If you feel powerful and empowered and proud of yourself, then you can send that out to others and they can feel that, and then they have a more joyful experience. So I really get that — if it doesn’t feel good to you, it’s hard to believe that it would be anything other than just mediocre.

Marissa: Yeah, it’s a big game changer. It really sucks to have to go out and sell merch after a bad show. Because I’ve come to realize that when I do it myself, it goes better and people want to meet. But there was a few shows on this run where it was one of those experiences where it was terrible on stage sound, bad vibes from the sound person, then having to get off 10 minutes later, people are like, “That was great! How do you feel?” And I’m like, “I feel like I want to die, but thanks.” I’m learning how to fake it a little bit, but it’s not easy.

I can’t wait to see you guys back in New York!

Rachel: Please come visit! We need to be back together.

Marissa: I know, I’m really sad. I feel like this was one of those really magical pairings that really worked well, and brought home to us. Not to be cheesy…

Rachel: So much of our new record that we’re supposed to talk about is about the concept of “leaving home is going home,” so it really felt special to get to feel that sense of home with you while we’re putting out new shit.

Marissa: I’m so excited for you. People are going to love it.

Gracie: Thank you. Well, we love you and we’re grateful for you.

Marissa: Love you girls! This was fun.