Grace Pettis On Women in Music and LGBTQ Ally Track

Alt-country/folk artist Grace Pettis packs her music with as much purpose as poetry, and the LGBTQ community is proud to have her as a supportive ally.

Earlier this year, she released her debut full-length album, Working Woman, which was produced by singer-songwriter Mary Bragg and mixed by two-time Grammy Award winner Shani Ghandi. Not only does the album feature some amazingly talented women working in music, but Pettis sings a succinct, biographical ballad called “Landon.” The track is a deeply person, unabashed apology to her gay best friend, Landon Beatty, for not being 100 percent supportive of him coming out.

Growing up in a small town in Alabama, Pettis grew up in a community steeped in traditional, Christian values. Deconstructing bias with each masterful lyric, she puts her faith under the microscope, and the result is a transcendently beautiful testament to the power of change, forgiveness, and the inner strength that comes from standing firm in who you are.

“Landon needed somebody to be on his side,” Pettis explains. He trusted me, and I let him down.”

The two have made amends since then and both feel the track is a meaningful way to share their story. They hope it will also help others who are at a similar crossroads.

Pettis took some time to chat more about the Working Woman and “Landon” with OFM, as well as growing up in a Bible Belt town, when her views on LGBTQ people truly changed, and what makes an ally.

Can you begin by telling us more about the concept behind Working Woman?
Yes! It’s funny because it was definitely intentional in the sense of the direction that guided our choices, but it is a little strange to me because the concept is just hiring women to make a record, which should not be that novel. Almost all my favorite records were made exclusively by men, and nobody calls those concept records. So, it is sort of a strange thing, but I don’t know what else to call it in the context of the industry [laughs].

Women are so underrepresented in so many aspects of the recording process. I think producers on any music that you hear, so anything on radio, in film, or has any measurable success, I think women producers are less than two percent of that music. The representation is just terrible all down the list, from songwriting to engineering to playing drums, bass, or lead guitar. If you hear a song on the radio, you may be lucky enough to hear a female voice in one out of every 10 songs. Maybe you’ll hear a couple female backup singers, but you are probably not hearing a female producer, songwriter, or engineer.

The concept that I had with Mary Bragg was to make a record in the classic studio commercial sense at a respected studio in Nashville and hire women at the top of their game, and that is what we did. I am sure that there are other records out there that have done that, maybe on a smaller garage band sort of scale or producers working in their basements, which is how Mary and a lot of other women got started because they did not get the gig at the big studio and had to teach themselves, but I cannot think of another record. I keep asking because I would love to hear about another one, but I cannot think of another one.

The album features a powerful, LGBTQ ally track called “Landon.” What is the full story behind this song?
It is the song I am probably the proudest of out of however many hundred of songs I have written in my life. It is a song I wrote for my best friend in high school, Landon Beatty. We went to high school in a small town in Alabama, and when he came out, that was an opportunity for me to be in his corner and be a friend to him, which is a very simple concept. You don’t even need to get into theology to understand the basic human need of somebody saying thank you for showing me your true self. Like, I see you; I love you; I am here for you. That is really the only thing I should have said, but instead, I responded with a bunch of things that I was supposed to say that we had been taught in youth group or whatever to gay people. Hate the sin, love the sinner—that kind of bullshit.

I said something along those lines, and Landon was very gracious and lovely. He is such a kind-hearted person, so he did not necessarily shut me out of his life, but we definitely drifted apart because of that. I mean, how could you not? If somebody says, “This is who I am,” and then I reject it and put up a wall, no wonder distance came between us. Even as I responded that way, which was the way I felt I was supposed to as a Christian, as I was saying the words, they did not ring true to me. They all felt like bullshit. It took me some years to truly unpack and figure out what I had done wrong, and why. That was a growth journey for me. When it did finally dawn on me, I needed to apologize. I had apologized over the phone and via messages and stuff, but I didn’t feel like I was expressing it in a way that really showed how sorry I was.

Music is an easy way for me to express how I feel. Also, because we were so close in high school and we understood each other so well at the age of 15, 16, 17, I needed him to know that I saw him, and I wanted him to see me. So, I ended up writing the song. Coming out is such a courageous thing, especially for a kid growing up in the deep South, so I wanted to honor that courage by responding courageously with the truth of what I had done. I wrote him a song, but it wasn’t necessarily a song that other people were supposed to hear. It was really just for him, and I said, “I will never play this to anybody else if you don’t want me to.” Like, this is your story. He loved the song and was like, “I wish you would play it.”

So, I started playing it, and it was so great because, on a personal level, it brought us closer. It helped us heal our friendship. Also, I have been playing it all over the country for years now, and almost every show, somebody will come up and talk to me about it. Either I’m queer; my child is queer, or I had a best friend 20 years ago, and I should call them. There is a story like that at almost every show. “Landon” is like the little song that could. It is out there doing good work in the world. I am very proud of it. It feels like such a gift.

Growing up in small-town Alabama in the Bible Belt, what was your community like when it came to LGBTQ people?
There really wasn’t a community for LGBTQ people in our town. I don’t know if there is now, but there might be because I have not lived there in years. I knew of a few people who were rumored to be gay, but nobody was out. Nobody was talking about it, at least not with their street friends. It felt covert. Everybody in town goes to church, reads the Bible, and there is a clear, hard line about [how] being gay is a sin. Pretty much every church in my town, at least at the time, it was like, you could not be Christian and gay. Pick a team. If you are going to be yourself and be gay, that’s fine, but you are going to Hell. If you are a Christian, that’s fine, but you have to give up on this gay thing or whatever.

That was the kind of culture that we grew up in, and it was preached about in sermons. Everybody knew the rules. So, I think for Landon, that is why he did not come out until he left town. If I was gay, I would have done the same thing. Nobody there, including me, and I was his best friend, is ready to hear about it, accept it, or listen. Unfortunately, that is the story for so many queer kids in the South. Your family, closest friends, and the people who know you the best are supposed to be your safe people, but simultaneously being so well-known and not known at all can be a very isolating, hard thing.

When did your personal views on LGBTQ people begin to change?
It really started to shift with that phone call with Landon where he came out after high school. I had known a few gay people growing up, but for whatever reason, I think just because of my privilege of being straight and cis, I never had to think about it too hard. I was a very devout Christian, am a devout Jesus kid in my own way, so because of that, it was just a subject that I did not want to think about. I put it on the back burner of my brain and never considered that people would have different experiences.

When it was my best friend, and I think this is the case for a lot of straight people, the change of heart starts with someone they really love. That was the case for me, and it took years of learning and listening. I joined the GLBTQ, it was called that at the time, club at my college. I was, like, the only Christian girl and straight person it, but I joined just to understand better. I even took a class on queer literature. It was a time in my life where I felt, and this may sound weird or ironic, but it felt like a spiritual thing for me. It very much felt like God was convicting me to lay down a bunch of idols and preconceptions about things, and just listen for a while. That changed me from the inside out.

So many people consider themselves to be LGBTQ allies, but don’t know what that truly entails. What do you believe makes a great ally?
Not only being an ally to the queer community but being an ally in general to any group of people that is oppressed or needs an ally, it kind of starts with owning your own complicity and owning the personal harm you have done in the world. Healing, reconciliation, and celebration is wonderful, and I think it is great that as a society, we are moving towards that. Pride is so much more mainstream and accepted, but I think, maybe, we have skipped over a few steps of actually taking responsibility for the harm that we have caused. We as in street people, Christians, and religious people.

We have inflicted a lot of damage and psychological harm, and there is a lot of hurt that has not been addressed. There are a lot of families that are broken. Even those of us who have moved to the other side of all this with our families and friends, there is still residual fallout. It’s like a nuclear bomb went off, and we have those carcinogens still in us. We must acknowledge that and work at calling ourselves out for the wrong that we have done. Try to make it right. Not just saying I’m sorry, but actually working to make it right.

How has “Landon” and Working Woman overall been received by listeners?
Very well! It’s interesting, the title track, “Working Woman,” and “Landon,” those are two songs that have always been received well. No matter who the audience is. They can be played at a conservative bar or a liberal folk club in the Northeast, both of those songs resonate with people because everybody knows someone who is queer. That is a universal thing, and everybody knows someone who they have wronged. Everybody owes somebody an apology, and everybody is probably owed one, too. I think that connects with people everywhere.

It’s funny, the more specific you sometimes get with your songwriting, the more it ends up being about other things and people. I think “Working Woman” is the same way. It is a song that you feel would be very specific because it is just for women or whatever, but everybody has a mom. More than half the population has a daughter. Women do more than half the work in this country, so I think it is a pretty universal concept. I have had teary-eyed bikers come up to me and be like, my mother was a nurse, and I just really appreciated that song. I think it is more universal than people think. The record has been going great, and I am kind of blown away by how well it is going [laughs].

You even got The Indigo Girls involved with “Landon.” What was it like working with them?
Because we made the record in 2020, all the special guest artists sent in their tracks remotely from wherever their home studio situation was. For the Indigo Girls, they were in a studio in Atlanta. The band and I recorded for three or four days in Nashville, so I did not get to be with the Indigo Girls when they sang the harmonies, which would have been a transcendent experience for me. I am a massive, massive fan. The first song I ever sang on stage was an Indigo Girls song when I was 11 with my mom, “Power of Two.” They are The Beatles to me, and they are heroes of mine in every sense. They truly redefined for me what a woman performer could be.

They were so different from all my other female heroes, who I also love, but they are very young, skinny, 18- 19-year-old beauty queens who can sing, but are not really in charge of the band. They didn’t pick the songs to record; they didn’t write the songs. The Indigo Girls were so different, and they were such a contrast from all the other kinds of women in music. Most of the women that I grew up listening to were girl groups, and the Indigo Girls, number one, were actually women. They weren’t 16; they wore what they wanted; they played what they wanted, and they wrote the songs and played the instruments. That in of itself is already radical.

They have always been heroes of mine, but I have not met them in person. This was all arranged through Rachael Sage, the head of my label, MPress Records, and she is an amazing artist herself. She is somebody that just goes for it, and she somehow made this happen with the Indigo Girls. Maybe because it was 2020 and they were not as busy, that was probably a helpful thing, too, but I really wish I could have been there with them. This, personally, meant a lot to me. I wrote them a long letter saying thank you. I hope I get to meet them in person someday.

Have you always had a passion for singing and songwriting?
Yes! I would even say, it is less of a passion, but it is like my first language. A piece of the pie chart of my life. When I was a little kid, I would walk around the house and just make up songs about whatever I was doing. I was constantly around music growing up. My dad was a musician; his friends were musicians, and my mom played music and sang. Even in the womb, I was constantly surrounded by music. It doesn’t feel like choice or some aspect of who I am. It feels very primal for me, and it is my main way of communication and making sense of the world.

Before we wrap up, are there any other upcoming projects or anything else you would like to mention or plug?
Definitely. I am in another band called Nobody’s Girl with BettySoo and Rebecca Loebe, and we released our debut, full-length album at the end of July. It was supposed to come out last summer, but the pandemic put things on hold. We are also going to, hopefully, play some shows for the first time since the before times, so that is very exciting.

Follow Pettis on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, and stay up-to-date by visiting her official website and Patreon page. Working Woman is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and all other digital streaming platforms.

Photos Courtesy of Nicola Gell