Last year I made an album called My Thanksgiving, and I thought I had said everything I needed to say about this holiday. I was wrong.
Because here is what happened. All year long, in the quiet spaces between releases, I kept coming back to my mother’s table. Not the idea of a Thanksgiving table, my actual mother’s actual table, the one made by the Amish, the one she covers with white linen every November and sets with her grandmother’s china. I kept remembering the specific things. The way my dad taught me to run my finger around the rim of a crystal goblet until it sang. The cranberry sauce nobody eats that she makes every single year anyway. The card table that disappeared when we grew up and reappeared the year I had kids.
And I realized My Thanksgiving was about the holiday. This new one is about the table across time. Same doorway, thirty years of different people standing in it.
So I made All Together, and it is twelve songs, and it is the most personal record I have ever released.
I want to tell you a little about how I make my music, because I always want to be honest with you about it. I write every word of these songs myself, from my own memories and my own life. Then I use AI tools to help me build the sound I hear in my head, Suno for the production that samples my own voice, Claude to help me shape and refine the lyrics I bring to the table. The stories are mine. The gratitude is mine. The technology helps me build the world these songs live in, the way a studio full of session players might for another artist. I am proud of this process and I talk about it openly, because I think the future of independent music is artists like me being able to make the records we hear in our hearts without a label deciding whether we are worth it.
Over the next twelve days I am going to walk you through every song on All Together, one per day. The morning drive to my mom’s. The blessing that goes long. The years we did not take a family photo, and why. The whole album is a single Thanksgiving Day, from the drive there in the cool morning light to the drive home at night when the radio finally switches over to Christmas music and the day is done.
If any of these stories sound like your family, that is the whole point. I write songs so that you feel something, so that you hear your own mother, your own table, your own missing chair. That is the only reason I do this.
Here is what I would love from you this November. Follow me on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, wherever you listen, so that the moment All Together releases you will see it and hear it first. Following is the single kindest thing you can do for an independent artist like me. It is how the algorithm learns I exist. It is how the next person finds me.
Come sit down. There is always room for one more.
Follow and listen on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, and Pandora. Come find me on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, and join my email list so you never miss a release.
What is the one Thanksgiving tradition your family refuses to change? Tell me in the comments. I read every one.
With so much love, Melanie Grace TheMelanieGrace
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