ANDY GRAMMER – MONSTER TOUR

You might be surprised Andy Grammer called his new album Monster. He was too. Long known as one of the most optimistic bright lights in the pop singer-songwriter sphere, Grammer found himself fighting demons and finding new corners of himself, places he hadn’t wanted to venture before. “Being happy, anger is my vulnerability,” he says. “I didn’t know how to deal with getting in touch with anger. I just pretended it wasn’t there.” Grammer embarked on a long mental health journey that mirrored an exploratory five-year interim between albums which, of course, happened to coincide with a particularly tumultuous five years for all of us. After everything, Monster, arriving October 4, became a document of someone walking through a fire they never wanted to even look at, and what happens when they emerge on the other side. 

In the half decade since 2019’s Naive, Grammer lived a lot of life. There were heart-bursting highs, like welcoming his second child, and harrowing trials, including the rupture of an important relationship. During the bleak pandemic years, he sought therapy for the first time, and began realizing there were all kinds emotions he was just beginning to process for the first time. Originally, Grammer experimented with capturing an era dynamic with both struggle and growth in smaller snapshots: A host of steady singles across 2020-2023, as well as 2022’s The Art Of Joy EP. Back then, Grammer planned to collect the singles alongside a few new songs for his fifth album. Instead, he picked up a mandolin. 

Grammer wasn’t intending to make an album built around mandolin, but it happened. He wrote one song called “Bigger Man,” the genesis and skeleton key to what became Monster. It was an uncustomary track for him: grappling with anger, but striving to remain bigger than the darker sides of that emotion. Suddenly a new album began pouring out of Grammer. The folk pedigree of the mandolin proved inspiring. “There’s something about Americana and the twang that felt real to me when singing about struggle,” he explains. 

Grammer struck a careful balance on Monster: He laid it all out there lyrically, but it’s not as if Monster is uncharacteristically heavy in aesthetic. Complex feelings were filtered through rousing instrumentals, reflective ballads and rejuvenating jams alike. Across the album, Grammer takes on a spectrum of human experience — the mandolin rippling alongside him, like old wisdom surfacing to lead him to some kind of answer. 

Now 40, Grammer’s seen his fair share of real shit, and the songs on Monster capture it all — the ugly and the beautiful sitting alongside one another, each making no sense without its counterpart. From the hurt and confusion of the album’s opening, these songs trace Grammer’s process of re-centering himself with what really matters in life before concluding with “Friends And Family.” Grammer sings of all the wild turns his life has taken, but decides “It all means nothing without friends and family.” It’s a portrait of a man who has wrestled with parts of himself, and found what’s really important.