Popdose is pleased to present the new single from Americana/indie-folk collective the Good Graces. Led by frontwoman Kim Ware, the group opened the Indigo Girls 2015 summer tour, and has shared bills with The Old Ceremony, Vandaveer, and more.

Set Your Sights (out July 7) is a reflective set of tracks that explore getting older, looking back on life, and trying to correct missteps. Ware describes as her ”midlife crisis record.”

New single “Good in It All” is a quiet, downtempo ballad about finding the silver lining in times of loss, driven by Ware’s airy vocals atop blankets of atmospheric, reverb-washed guitars, piano, and sparse percussion.

“I initially wrote ‘Good in It All’ around 2000 or so,” Ware said. “It’s definitely the oldest song on the record. But I wrote it when I was a drummer. I didn’t really play guitar at the time. I constructed the vocal melody and lyrics while I was driving home from work. I came home and hummed it to my ex, who I was in a band with at the time. Then he came up with the chords to go along with my lyrics and melody.”

In 2016, Ware started thinking about the song and how it seemed to identify itself as the first Good Graces song. “It really set the stage for a lot of the stuff I wrote later, and I wondered what it would sound like if I wrote it today. So, I sat down and re-wrote it; I changed the vocal melody in the verses a little but kept most of the verse lyrics. But when I got to what used to be the chorus, I just knew I wouldn’t sing that today! I decided to completely change that part. Then I put new chords together that worked with the new vocal melody.”

Ware kept the song in a stripped-down form for the live setting but when it came time to record it, she felt like the group could do a lot of atmospheric accents with this particular material. “In the end, the meaning of the song is the same as when I first wrote it — it’s about being with someone and feeling like you are doing all you can to accentuate the positive, but everything seems to fall flat because they always see the negative side of things. Perhaps the new chorus is sort of me saying to him now, years later, that I hope when he looks back he can take something good away from it.”

The Good Graces’ Set Your Sights is available here for pre-order. Special thanks to Rachel Hurley at Baby Robot Media for addition information in this post.

About the Author

Dw. Dunphy

Dw. Dunphy is a writer, artist, and musician. For Popdose he has contributed many articles that can be found in the site's archives. He also writes for New Jersey Stage, Musictap.net, Ultimate Classic Rock, and Diffuser FM. His music can be found at http://dwdunphy.bandcamp.com/.

View All Articles