Melanie Grace

Tag: singer songwriter blog

  • Tomorrow Is the First Day of Fall and I Cannot Contain Myself

    Tomorrow Is the First Day of Fall and I Cannot Contain Myself

    Tomorrow. It is tomorrow.

    I realize that the autumnal equinox is technically an astronomical event and not something that requires a countdown or a vigil or a blog post written the night before in a state of barely contained excitement. I realize that. And yet here we are, because I am a person who has been waiting for fall since approximately the middle of July when it was one hundred degrees outside and I was deeply, personally offended by the weather.

    Tomorrow the calendar makes it official. The air has already been making it official for a few weeks now, if we are being honest, because fall does not wait for the calendar. Fall arrives when it is ready and the calendar catches up eventually. But there is still something about the first official day, the equinox, the moment the earth tilts and the northern hemisphere says okay, we are done with that, that feels like a holiday to me. A personal, deeply held, slightly over-the-top holiday.

    I have been celebrating the arrival of fall my whole life. Not with any particular ritual or tradition, though I think one should probably be developed and I am open to suggestions, but with a feeling. A full chest, all-in, this-is-my-season feeling that I have never been able to talk myself out of or down from. Fall just does something to me that no other season does. It makes me feel most like myself. Most alive. Most creative. Most grateful.

    I wrote a whole album about it. Give Me Fall came out on August 31st and it is my love letter to everything this season is and everything it brings and everyone it is better with. Fifteen songs, from the joyful opener about pumpkins and hay rides and corn mazes to the spiritual closer about learning to let go the way the leaves do. If you have not listened yet, tomorrow, the first day of fall, is the perfect day to press play for the first time.

    But I am also thinking tonight, on the eve of the equinox, about what is coming after fall. Not because I want to rush through fall, I absolutely do not, I want to live in every single October minute, but because I am a maker and I am always working on the next thing while I am loving the current thing. And the next thing I am working on is rooted in winter and tradition and storytelling and the kind of music that feels like candlelight and snow and something ancient and beautiful. I cannot say much more than that yet. But I am saying that much on purpose because I want you excited. You should be excited.

    Get on my email list here and you will hear about it first when I am ready to share.

    For now, tomorrow. First day of fall. I want you to do something intentional with it. Open a window. Make something warm to drink. Put on a flannel. Go outside and actually look at the sky. Take one slow breath of the autumn air and let it do what it does to you.

    And then put on Give Me Fall and let me celebrate the season with you. Find me on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, and Pandora. Follow me so every new release finds you automatically. Come hang out on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube where I will absolutely be posting about the first day of fall like it is a major holiday. Because it is.

    Tell me in the comments: how are you celebrating the first day of fall tomorrow? What is your plan? I want the details.

    See you on the other side of the equinox.

    Warmly, Melanie Grace

  • What Fall Is Teaching Me This Year

    What Fall Is Teaching Me This Year

    Every year fall teaches me something. Not always the same thing and not always something I was ready to learn, but something. The season has a way of doing that. It creates just enough stillness and just enough beauty that the things you have been too busy to notice all summer suddenly have room to surface.

    This year fall is teaching me about presence.

    I know that sounds like something you read on a coffee mug, and I promise I am going somewhere more specific with it than that. But I want to start there because I think presence is one of those words we use so often that it stops meaning anything, and fall has a way of making it mean something again.

    Here is what I notice every October. The light changes. It comes in at a different angle, lower and more golden, and it makes everything look like it is worth looking at. The ordinary things, the kitchen table, the coffee mug, the person across from you, they all look different in October light. More vivid. More worth memorizing. And I find myself doing something in fall that I do not do as naturally in other seasons. I find myself stopping. Just stopping and looking and letting something be beautiful without immediately moving on to the next thing.

    I wrote about this in a song called Golden Hours on my new album Give Me Fall, which is out now everywhere you stream music. The line that I keep coming back to is this one: you can be awake inside them. The golden hours, the beautiful moments, the October evenings around the firepit. You cannot hold onto them and you cannot slow them down, but you can be awake inside them. You can choose to actually be where you are.

    That is what fall is teaching me this year. To be where I am.

    Practically this has looked like a few things. It has looked like putting my phone in another room during dinner more consistently than I have in years. It has looked like taking five extra minutes on the porch in the morning before the day starts asking things of me. It has looked like saying yes to the hay ride even when there were other things I could have been doing, and then sitting on that wagon looking up at the October sky and feeling genuinely glad I went.

    I think this is a faith practice as much as it is a life practice. Paying attention is an act of gratitude. Stopping to actually see something beautiful is a way of saying thank you to the One who made it. And fall, with its extravagant color and its lowering light and its particular quality of air, makes that gratitude easier to access than almost any other season. It is hard to be rushing through October and miss what October is doing. The season insists on being noticed.

    Proverbs talks about wisdom being present at creation, delighting in the inhabited world, rejoicing in the human race. I love that image, wisdom rejoicing. I think fall is a season for rejoicing. For being genuinely, fully glad. Not performing gladness but actually feeling it, which requires stopping long enough to feel it.

    What is fall teaching you this year? I am asking sincerely. I think these are the conversations worth having in September, before the busyness of the holiday season arrives and the pace picks back up and presence becomes harder to choose.

    I am also going to mention quietly that something is coming later this year that I think is going to give a lot of people a reason to stop and feel something. I have been working on a project with a very different feel from Give Me Fall, something that leans into the storytelling and tradition of the winter season. I am not ready to share all of it yet but I am so excited, and I think if you love this time of year and the faith woven through it you are going to love what is coming. Get on my email list here to be the first to hear about it.

    In the meantime, Give Me Fall is out now and waiting for you on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, and Pandora. Please follow me so you never miss a new release. Come find me on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

    Be where you are today. Fall is worth it.

    Warmly, Melanie Grace