Music / Grace Petrie

"And if I spend my life on the losing side
You can lay me down
Knowing that I tried"

—"The Losing Side"

Grace Petrie is a British musician, a folk singer-songwriter from Leicester. Petrie is a feminist, a lesbian and strongly left-wing, and the her music often includes related themes.

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Grace Petrie's music contains examples of the following tropes:

• A Cappella: "Galway" is an a Cappella Self-Deprecation song about her first show in Galway, with a tiny, if enthusiastic, audience.
• Beautiful All Along: Pointedly subverted in the video for "Black Tie", where Grace suffers through a makeover to give her a traditional feminine look while the lyrics talk about how people won't be trapped by a "narrow view of gender".
• Card Sharp: "The House Always Wins" uses a crooked casino as a metaphor for the British politicians behind Brexit. The video shows Grace across the table from a gleefully sinister dealer who's using sleight of hand and card tricks to cheat.
  'Cos the dice is always loaded
  The coins all wear two grins
  The devil pays the dealer for his multitude of sins
  But whichever way the roulette wheel spins
  The house always wins.
• Flipping the Table: Near the end of the video for "The House Always Wins", Grace finally loses patience with the Card Sharp she's facing and angrily overturns the table they're sitting at.
• Incompatible Orientation: "The Last Man on Earth" centres around the singer's friendship with a straight woman, and the acknowledgment that however compatible they may seem, her friend will keep dating men until she marries the "least-worst option".
  I will be the the best I can
  But you won't choose me
  Over the last man on Earth
• The Lost Lenore: The narrator of "This House" lives in the house they shared with a man who's passed away, surrounded by memories and his carefully tended possessions, mourning the things they never said. Despite protestations that "it's not love / Oh, this thing I'm dying of", they still focus on "the ways that he was mine". Petrie's stated that the narrator is male and the song was inspired by two men who lived together, not quite a couple, and never quite resolved what they were to each other before one passed away.
• Mouthing the Profanity: In the video for "The House Always Wins" Grace mouths "What the fuck?" to camera as the Card Sharp's tricks grow more obvious.
• Muse Abuse: "No Woman Ever Wants To Be A Muse" is a song about how artists write about the women in their lives and the experience is "to be dragged over hot coals, to be slandered, to be used".
  'Cos history's written by the winners
  Yeah, and art is made to last
  And I dread the day I'll have to answer
  For the songs of breakups past
• My Country Tis of Thee That I Sting: "The Best Country In The World" is a scathing attack on the austerity, profiteering, corruption and pollution of post-Brexit Britain.
  Striking doctors, striking teachers
  And no railway lines to reach us
  We would fight them on the beaches
  But the beach is full of shit.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • "Coldwaterproofjacket" opens with a statement that she was "born too late to make a claim to any half-decent band names", and that it was "too much to hope there'd be any good tunes left".
  • "Galway" is a song about a show in Galway with a tiny audience, a reminder that success is fragile.
  • "Nobody Knows That I'm A Fraud" is a whole song in this vein, listing all the reasons why the singer's not quite good enough, or genuine enough, at least in her own eyes.
• Shout-Out: "The Last Man on Earth", a song about unrequited love and Incompatible Orientation, throws in a reference to Brooklyn Nine-Nine's lead characters ("and you can be my Santiago if I can't be your Perralta").
• Subdued Section: The last minute of "The Losing Side" repeats the chorus with more voices in the background, building up the energy — and then drops back to A Cappella as Grace sings alone for the last ten seconds or so.
• Take That!:
  • There's No Such Thing as a Protest Singer ends with the Title Drop song, "I Wish The Guardian Believed That I Exist". The EP cover is created in the style of a Guardian front page and the lyrics lament that the left-wing newspaper believes protest songs ended when the mines closed, decades ago. There's a final swipe at the NME as well.
  • "Black Tie" rails against transphobia and the "bigotry and fear / that's uniting Piers Morgan and Germaine Greer".
• Unrequited Love Lasts Forever:
  • The singer of "Coldwaterproofjacket" is clear that she's given her heart away and will "wait forever", even if her beloved never returns her affection.
    Well, I know you're locked up like a fortress
    I'd wait forever at your doors
    And even if they never open
    You don't need to be mine, but I'll be yours
  • The singer of "The Last Man on Earth" is conscious that she'll always be there as her female friend's fallback for company and emotional support ("darling, don't you know you'll never lose me"), and will even be there to plan the hen night and support her wedding to the "least worst" male option, but Incompatible Orientation means it will always be unrequited.

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