Robert Grace On Going Viral With Fake Fine: "That song changed everything for me"

Irish singer-songwriter Robert Grace’s recent hit, Fake Fine garnered him tens of millions of plays on Spotify, millions of YouTube views, and 1.8 million TikTok followers. He opens up about the serious message behind the song, and being inspired by everything from toxic relationships to pining for vampires in new tracks, Break the Silence and Beautiful Nightmare.

Fake Fine went platinum in Ireland, spent five weeks at No 1 on both the Irish Homegrown charts and the Shazam Ireland Charts. You’re known for your straightforward yet tongue in cheek lyrics that often tackle issues many people experience, but rarely talk about openly. Has it always been important to you to push these boundaries in your songwriting?

That song changed everything for me and was probably the most raw song that I had. There's a lot of stuff in it that is pretty to the point, and it connected with people. It's funny because it's only in the last two years that I have actually started to write songs that were genuinely about me. 

Most of the time I was just writing a song in a writing session, and usually writing for someone else. Now there's a lot more of a personal element to everything I make, and I feel like the songs that are more personal are the songs that connect with people.

I have a lot of mental health-related songs, and it's weird, because I started to write them by accident. I was just writing a song, and I’d be in the middle of it and think, ‘Okay, maybe I'm not okay,’ or, ‘maybe there's a few things that I need to address here’. 

For a long time, I pushed things to the side or just hid things away, or tried to cover them up in some way. Writing songs actually helped me figure out what was wrong with me – well, not wrong – but what was going on in my own head. 

Luckily enough, it ended up helping other people, which is the main thing that I want from my music. If one person feels better after listening to one of my songs, I've achieved what I wanted.

Alongside Dermot Kennedy and Niall Horan, you were the third Irish male solo act to have a top 20 hit in your native country last year. Has that sunk in yet?

Everyone in the world knows who Dermot Kennedy and Niall Horan are… no one knows who I am [laughs]. I mean, not no one, but you know what I mean? 

What's weird about that situation is to be included in a group of people who the whole world knows, and here I am alongside them just getting started! It's a massive compliment and I’m grateful to everyone who supported me. I still can't wrap my head around the fact that I'm on a list with those two people…

Break the Silence paints a picture of a toxic relationship coming to an end, and its aftermath. Was this one of your songs about you, or someone else?

All the songs I do now stem from a personal experience. I'm married though, and we’ve been together for about eight years, so it's been a long time since I was in that scenario! But there were situations when I was younger that would have been similar, and I know a lot of my friends have been in situations like that. 

So I take stuff from myself, and some facts from other people that I know, or it could be inspiration from movies that I've watched, and I build a story around all that information. I love doing that as well, it's like writing a story.

Recent track, Beautiful Nightmare has an entirely different vibe. What events inspired this song?

This one is funny – well, not funny in that way – but it was written with production duo, PhD. Myself, and one of my good friends, Ryan Mac (he's an artist and a songwriter as well) had a writing session and said, ‘What if we wrote a song where you’re in love with a vampire?’ 

So they keep turning people into vampires, but they're just stringing you along – they're making you do all the dirty work, and you're hypnotised by them, and all you want to do is for them to turn you into a vampire. 

That's the story we had in our head, but obviously the main story is about being in love with someone who makes you feel like they want you, but they throw you to the side. One minute they act like they love you, and the next minute, they couldn't care less. So that's the actual message, but we had this cool idea to bring vampires into it.

You’ve been working in your home studio a lot recently – especially during lockdown – and anyone visiting your Instagram, YouTube and TikTok pages can see you have a keen and creative interest in music production. What are your key pieces of studio kit?

I’ve had my Genelec 8030 monitors for about 10 years, and they’re still like the day I got them. I love the bass; they do have some pump in them! I love them for listening to any kind of music, actually. When I was at University of Limerick in Ireland, they had Genelecs in every studio. 

This university has top class studios, so I knew I had to get Genelecs because they're obviously the best. I used them in the studio there, and I was like, ‘Jesus, these are incredible!’ It's mad because for a long time, I just thought speakers were speakers; I didn't really understand the difference in quality and drivers and all that kind of stuff, until you try the top end stuff. 

Once you do that, you're like, ‘Oh my God, I feel like I'm in the music’, and that's what Genelecs do. They really put you in this spectrum of the sound you're listening to; they're a super high quality speaker.

Plus, I’ve had them for about 10 years, and there's not a bother – I've never had to fix them. They've been literally in freezing cold sometimes, like when I had a studio up at my parents house in the shed – there's no heating in there, and no insulation or anything. 

They would be in all sorts of temperatures and still work absolutely perfectly. They're just beast speakers! If anyone is going for speakers and they have the money, I'd recommend getting Genelecs – they're super good.