Turned Into Me Rachel Grae

• 1 Run with the River 02:28
• 2 Safe With Me 02:30
• 3 Raised By A Woman 02:32
• 4 Me You and Your Ego 02:35
• 5 Need Your Love 02:15
• 6 Easy for You 03:23
• 7 Don’t Waste Your Breath 02:42
• 8 Tell Me Why 02:43
• 9 Good Feeling 02:22
• 10 Not About a Boy (Interlude) 00:38
• 11 Come A Day 02:58
• 12 Sorry for Her 03:17
• Total Runtime 30:23

Info for Turned Into Me

When Rachel Grae sits down to talk about her upcoming Lollapalooza debut, she’s surprisingly composed. The singer-songwriter from New Jersey just wrapped her first television appearance on Chicago’s WGN, and in a few hours she’ll hit the stage at one of the country’s biggest music festivals. Most young artists would be fueled by adrenaline or lost in last-minute rehearsals, but Rachel is different. She speaks with confidence even as everything around her feels new.

“For something like this I like to be in the best shape I can possibly be in holistically, physically, emotionally, and vocally,” she says. “Confidence building is the way I prepare for these things. I allow myself to control what I can and let go of the rest.”

At 23, Rachel is carving out her own space in the music world. From viral TikTok moments to Times Square billboards, her upcoming album Turned Into Me is a meditation on growth, identity, and the messy process of becoming who you’re meant to be. Rachel tells me she grew up as the creative outlier in a decidedly non-musical family; the left-handed “dreamer” in a house of practical right-handers. “Nobody in my family makes music, sings, or is even remotely creative,” she says. “I was just told I was an oddball my whole life.”

When she was 12 Rachel asked to record covers in a studio as a birthday gift. “I was always obsessed with the idea of recording music,” she says. “But I also knew I wanted to go into a space of helping people. When I was younger I thought I would go into therapy or psychology to pursue that. Once I put a pen to the paper I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is how I’m going to help people.’”

By her senior year of high school, Rachel had found her rhythm posting YouTube covers every Tuesday. “That’s how my previous manager Michael Morrison found me. We first met at a local restaurant called Ritz Diner.”

When Michael asked if she had performed, written songs, or played instruments before, Rachel’s response was an unequivocal “no” to all three. Her father mentioned she kept a lyric notebook and would sing melodies that came to her. “I truly thought that was the equivalent of having songs stuck in your head, except all the songs were mine,” Rachel says. “I was just creating random melodies.”

Her parents surprised her with her very own keyboard the next day. “I bawled my eyes out like I had just won a Grammy when I saw it,” she says. Music soon became her daily practice, with self-imposed schedules starting at 7AM and hours spent crafting chorus after chorus after school.

During those years, Rachel was also soaking up musical influences. Adele for vulnerability, Amy Winehouse for soul, Julia Michaels for her ability to turn heartbreak into conversational hooks. The timing aligned perfectly with the start of 2020, allowing her to squeeze in co-writing sessions in Los Angeles just before the pandemic hit. Her breakthrough arrived in 2021 with the release of her single “Bad Timing,” a song that would put her face on one of Times Square’s largest billboards.

“By the end of the album I truly felt like I healed my inner child. I also felt like I was manifesting who I want to be.” - Rachel Grae

She kept the momentum going with “Outsider” and “Friend Like Me,” the latter born from a TikTok moment in her kitchen. Rachel was cooking eggs and casually improvising a melody when she realized she had stumbled onto a hook that could become a song. The clip went viral and eventually turned into one of her breakout singles. Her first full-length album Journal No. 1 arrived in 2024, a compilation of songs tracing her journey from teen dreamer to emerging artist.

As Rachel prepares to release her second album Turned Into Me this spring, she says it represents a significant evolution from her debut. Where she defines her first album as a scrapbook of songs written since her teens, this one has a clear design: alternating tracks that explore who she was versus who she’s become.

“Every other song, it’s who I was, who I am, who I was, who I am, on the same topic,” she says. Creating that duality required deep self-examination according to Rachel, especially on her track “Safe with Me,” which emerged from a “therapy session” with co-writers Joe Janiak and Dave Gibson.

“Dave made me get to the bottom of what I wrote about, and that’s what really made it emotional,” she says. “The production led with the conversation first and how it made us feel. ‘Safe With Me’ is one of the most vulnerable songs I’ve ever written.”

The song digs into people-pleasing and self-sacrifice, themes that run through the entire album. “For a part of my life I tried to protect everybody else until I got to a point where I thought, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know who I am. I’m just making everybody else happy, but who am I?’”

Rachel says Turned Into Me is more mature, soulful, and organic than her debut album. The sound reflects her current mindset: less focused on sadness, and more on independence and self-worth. “I’m such a preacher of independence, feeling powerful, and feeling empowered by who you are without having anybody else do that for you,” she says. “By the end of the album I truly felt like I healed my inner child. I also felt like I was manifesting who I want to be.”

Sonically the record leans into R&B grooves, country storytelling, and isn’t afraid to throw in a horn section when the song calls for it. “I centered this album around how the songs make me feel rather than trying to box myself into one category this time,” Rachel says. “I didn’t think about how I’d be perceived, what lane I needed to stay in, or what kind of playlist I needed to make. I just wrote it for myself.”

Part of that growth came from switching up her listening habits while writing. Instead of sticking to mainstream pop, she discovered artists like Olivia Dean, Teddy Swims, and Raye.

“Funny enough, there are actually 11 songs on the album, and ten of them were written one right after the other on the same day,” she says. “One song got cut and I rewrote it, but everything else came together in a single day because the whole project was so planned out. When we wrote one side of the album, we already had a clear idea of what the other side would look like.”

When she’s not making music, Rachel stays firmly planted in creative spaces. She’s passionate about fashion, particularly streetwear with a New York edge. “I love fashion. That’s a huge thing that I’m into, so anytime I can just roam the streets and people watch and look at fashion, that’s a big thing,” she says. She gravitates toward brands like Off-White and Ottolinger but is equally likely to hunt for vintage pieces at thrift stores, always favoring baggy jeans and pants.

With upcoming shows on the horizon, Rachel is keeping things simple. Family and friends will be in the crowd, her voice is ready, and her band is tight. She says she’s manifesting a successful headlining tour and to keep growing the community she’s built with her fans.

“I feel like a different version of me is birthing with this album,” she says.

Rachel Grae

Rachel Grae
grew up in Livingston, New Jersey, and developed a passionate interest in music—which was constantly playing in her childhood home—at an early age. At ten, she began sharing covers on social media and jotting down her first lyrics and melodies in a notebook. The ambition to become a musician and singer took hold, leading her to Los Angeles in 2020 for her first songwriting session; this experience was pivotal, helping her quickly define her own sound through influences like Adele, Bruno Mars, Kelly Clarkson, and Amy Winehouse. Fully committed to her music, she convinced her parents to let her leave college early to focus on her career. She began releasing singles regularly in 2021, gaining significant attention with the song "Bad Timing"—a momentum that grew in 2022 and 2023 thanks to the standout single "It’ll Be Okay" and "Different Lives," a collaboration with Fly By Midnight. Her debut album, *Journal No. 1*, was released in December 2024, yielding another hit in "Outsider"—a success mirrored by the track "Friend Like Me." To date, the album has garnered over 250 million streams and received widespread critical acclaim. In early 2025, she headed to North Hollywood to write new music with Joe Janik (Kygo, Ellie Goulding) and Dave Gibson (Bruno Mars, Bebe Rexha), embarking on a new chapter. She still carries the notebook where she records her feelings and most intimate thoughts. Her latest single, "Safe With Me," arrived in early July; featuring stirring gospel influences, it followed the feminist anthem "Raised By A Woman" and the track "Know Better." As Rachel Grae herself says, her music is about her fans taking something away from it that they can use. "It’s like a rebirth for me. I feel like a boss, and I hope you do too."

This album contains no booklet.