Melanie Grace

Tag: acoustic folk singer songwriter

  • Pumpkin Patch Day — The Song About the Best Kind of Ordinary

    Pumpkin Patch Day — The Song About the Best Kind of Ordinary

    Nobody warned me that pumpkin patch day would become one of my favorite days of the entire year. When my kids were little I thought it was just something you did, one of those fall activities you check off the list, load everyone in the car, drive to the farm, take the requisite photos on the hay bales, buy a pumpkin or twelve, go home. But somewhere along the way, pumpkin patch day stopped being an activity and started being a feeling. A whole, full, golden feeling that I look forward to almost more than anything else fall has to offer.

    That feeling became Track 3 on my new album Give Me Fall, releasing August 31st.

    “Pumpkin Patch Day” is one of the most joyful songs I have ever written, and I say that as someone who has written a lot of joyful songs. There is something about capturing a day that looks ordinary from the outside but feels absolutely extraordinary from the inside that makes a songwriter want to try to bottle it. This song is my attempt at the bottle.

    The first verse sets the whole scene so specifically that I hope it feels familiar to anyone who has ever done this. Packing everybody up before the morning got too warm. Someone had the coffee ready. Someone else had all the shoes. Driving down that old farm road with the windows halfway down, not really having a plan except to spend the day together. That last line is the whole point of the song before the song even gets started. No plan. No agenda. Just the day and the people you love and the farm down the road.

    What I love most about pumpkin patch day as a concept is that it is inherently photogenic and inherently chaotic at the same time. The kids take off the second you pull into the lot. They do not wait. They cannot wait. And you are grabbing someone’s hand and trying to keep up and every pumpkin looks perfect in the light and you are watching it all happen around you thinking, I need to remember this exact moment. I need to memorize the way this feels.

    The third verse of this song is my favorite because it is about the moment that always happens at pumpkin patches, the moment someone finds a pumpkin that is absolutely, definitively too big, and somehow it is going home with you. It has to. There is no other option. And the person you love looks at you and laughs the way they laugh when something is too good, and you take their picture in the middle of the mess, and that picture becomes the whole story.

    The bridge is where the song gets quiet and a little bittersweet. It talks about looking back on a day like this when the kids are grown and the farm stand is gone, and saying that was everything. That was the whole thing. That was us when we were young and fall was long. I cry a little every time I sing it, and I am not ashamed of that at all.

    This is the thing about fall for me. The ordinary days are the extraordinary ones. The pumpkin patch days and the corn maze Saturdays and the firepit nights, these are the days I will remember. Not because anything grand happened, but because everything that matters was right there.

    I wrote this album collaborating with Claude AI as my songwriting partner and used Suno AI for music production, which sampled my own voice. Every lyric is mine, written from real memories and real feelings, and this song is no exception. Pumpkin patch day is a real day in my real life and I am so glad it found its way into a song.

    Tell me in the comments: what is your pumpkin patch day tradition? Do you go every year? Do you have a farm you always return to? I want to hear about your favorite pumpkin patch memory because I genuinely love knowing that other people feel this way about a field full of orange gourds.

    Give Me Fall drops August 31st and I cannot wait for you to hear all fifteen songs. Please follow me on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, and Pandora so this album finds you the moment it releases. Come hang with me on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, and get on my email list here so you never miss a thing.

    Give me pumpkin patch day. Every single year.

    Warmly, Melanie Grace

  • September Starts — And So Does Everything Good

    September Starts — And So Does Everything Good

    Can I tell you something that might sound a little dramatic? September feels more like a new year to me than January ever has. January is cold and dark and honestly a little depressing, and the resolutions I make in January tend to last about eleven days before I quietly retire them and pretend they never happened. But September? September walks in with that particular golden light and the smell of something changing and a brand new feeling of possibility that I have never been able to fully explain, only feel. Deep in my chest. Like a door opening.

    That feeling is what gave me “September Starts.”

    This is Track 2 on my new album Give Me Fall, releasing August 31st, and it might be my favorite song on the whole record to sing. Not because it is the most complicated or the most emotional, but because it is the most true. Every single line of this song came directly from my own life, my own mornings, my own experience of watching September arrive and feeling something inside me wake back up.

    The song opens with a chill in the air that wasn’t there last week. That is a real thing that happens, and if you are a fall person you know exactly what I mean. One morning everything is still summer and the next morning the air is different and you feel it before you are even fully awake. New backpacks by the door. Little shoes on little feet. The routine comes back easy like it never went away. There is something so grounding about September rhythms, about the way a family finds its pace again after the loose, wonderful chaos of summer.

    But the line that really cracked this song open for me is in the second verse. I make my coffee slower. I take a minute on the porch. And in my version of this song, the person I love pulls me close a little, the way you do when you know what someone is moving toward even before they say it. That small moment of being known, of being seen in your own quiet joy, is what the whole love thread of this album is reaching for. Fall is the season where I feel most myself, and sharing that with someone who gets it? That is everything.

    The pre-chorus ties directly into the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote that anchors this entire album: “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” I have been in love with that line for years, and when I finally sat down to write a whole album about fall, it became the thesis of everything. September starts and suddenly I remember how to live. How to live with you.

    I wrote this album collaborating with Claude AI on lyrics and structure, and using Suno AI for music production, which sampled my own voice in the process. I write every word myself, and this song went through several drafts before the bridge finally found its footing. The bridge is where the song gets really personal. It talks about the way fall feels like home and how the person you love is the reason you keep finding your way back to yourself. It is the way you hand me coffee without asking how I take it. That detail. That tiny, enormous detail of being known so well that someone knows your coffee order without asking. That is a whole love story in one line.

    If September has ever felt like permission to you, this song is for you. If you have ever written a little list of fall things you want to do and found that every item on it had someone’s name woven through it, this song is for you. And if you have ever stood on a porch in the first week of September with something warm in your hands and thought yes, here we go again, I hope this song finds you right there in that moment.

    Give Me Fall releases August 31st and I am so ready to share this whole album with you. Fifteen songs written with love, all of them reaching for that golden feeling that only fall brings.

    Tell me in the comments: does September feel like a new beginning to you? What is the first thing you do when September arrives? I want to hear all of it.

    Please go follow me on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, and Pandora so you are the first to hear this album the moment it drops. Following on your streaming platform is the single best thing you can do to support an independent artist and it takes about three seconds. Come hang out with me on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, and join my email list here where I share everything first.

    September starts. And so does everything good.

    Warmly, Melanie Grace