Review: Ellie Grace wanders through ruin on ‘Nothing is Easy’

“Stars align for this one moment in time / It’s plain to see we’re meant to be,” sings Ellie Grace with a bit of honey on her tongue. “I’ll Never Love Another,” from her second studio record, Nothing is Easy, emerges as among her rawest and purest performances. The luminescent arrangement gives a window to the darkest, dustiest corners of her soul. Grace bares it all through acoustic-wrought productions that seem haunted, perhaps even tortured. “I feel like grief is the one thing that binds us all,” the Seattle singer-songwriter says in press materials. She sews that immense soul-sucking throughout 10 songs, never letting it slip for even just a moment.

“Ashes” pulverizes the lungs first, before working on the extremities. “There’s nothing left to say but to fall to your knees and pray,” Grace weeps over an eerie choir of strings. That willingness to be honest allows her to be visceral in her understanding of humanity and the experiences we all must endure, sooner or later. With “Turn Back Time,” she twists the knife even more: “I died yesterday / It’s too bad I still had things to say.” When death arrives, particularly that of others, the inevitability of our own strikes as a viper does in the desert.

Grace bands together with a fine lineup of players. Those include Josh Neumann (Brandi Carlile), Dave Terry (Aqueduct), Dan Walker (Heart, Amy Ray), Garrett Lunceford (The Divorce, Portugal. The Man), and Kimo Muraki (Surrealized), who swiftly and assuredly rise to the occasion in supplying the album with an earthy feel. Such a rootsy, folksy texture gives further weight to Grace’s craft. Nothing is Easy feels lived-in and rustic, as though she’d been living for decades. She’s wise beyond her years, and at only 16-years-old, she’s experienced more life than most people ever do.

“I feel too much and not enough,” Grace admits through the greying, suffocating fog of “Crooked Laugh,” a deceptively rollicking number that’s terribly sombre and meditative. She cries out, and all she hears are her screams echoing back. That emotional chamber taunts her, but in exposing every nasty nerve ending, she slowly but surely exorcises those demons. For her own sake, and maybe the listener’s too, that transparency is vital to a healthy state of being. Without it, we just wouldn’t be humans, now would we?

Ellie Grace is irrefutably an artist to watch. Nothing is Easy isn’t a perfect album, but it is a perfect snapshot of her life in this moment in time. She clutches the loss and grief pounding in her chest, so that we, too, can feel what it’s like to confront death and see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s only a matter of time, really.

Nothing is Easy is out everywhere now.

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