Continuing to give listeners a taste of her “Swiftian prowess” on the songwriting front, Gracie Abrams has rolled out the second music video for a single from The Secret of Us: “I Love You, I’m Sorry.” Something of a “sequel” to 2020’s “I Miss You, I’m Sorry,” Abrams is only somewhat less doleful on this particular track (which she first previewed on Instagram earlier this year, exactly four years after the release of “I Miss You, I’m Sorry”). Of course, more than apologizing to the object of her affection for hurting him and loving him (even still), she’s ultimately apologizing to herself for being silly enough to do so. But, as another Swiftian acolyte, Selena Gomez, once said, “The heart wants what it wants.” (Mind you, Woody Allen said this before her…about Soon-Yi Previn—and yes, Allen does seem like someone who would co-star in Only Murders in the Building with Gomez if he weren’t cancelled.)
Like the first single from The Secret of Us, “Risk,” the video for “I Love You, I’m Sorry” is once again directed by Abrams’ bestie and frequent co-songwriter, Audrey Hobert. Accordingly, “I Love You, I’m Sorry” offers a similar “narrative” to “Risk” in that, basically, Abrams is an absolute wreck over a guy, all while attempting, hopelessly, to “play it cool.” Except that, in the case of “I Love You, I’m Sorry,” the relationship was actually serious. Serious enough for her to still be reflecting on it while sitting on the beach two years later. For that’s where Hobert commences the story, with Abrams describing, “Two Augusts ago/I told the truth, oh/But you didn’t like it, you went home.”
Hobert then reveals Abrams in a series of scenes during which her overall vibe echoes the lyric, “I might not feel real, but it’s okay, mm.” Her aura of “not feeling real” shows up when she’s dissociatedly drinking Aperol spritzes with friends (including Hobert), when she’s riding in the backseat of a car, when she’s in bed reading a book with a cover that generically reads, “Self Help” (that’s right, no hyphen)—when she’s doing, hell, just about anything. In the book-reading scene, Abrams also looks ever so slightly like Billie Eilish in her current Hit Me Hard and Soft era, but then, there’s also moments when she doesn’t look so dissimilar from Madison Beer or Olivia Rodrigo either. All of which is to say that Abrams channels quite a few singer-songwriter types of the moment, both lyrically and aesthetically.
Though she does seem, at the very least, to be “original” in terms of being among the few Gen Z “pop stars” to proudly display her drinking habit in full effect, cheersing the viewer with her spritz in a manner that indicates she’s gotten slightly “classier” since she was filling her wine glass to the brim with a nondescript red in “Risk.” Her “class” game has also been one-upped by paying slight homage to Bob Dylan’s “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine),” still every “thoughtful” female songwriter’s go-to for inspiration (followed closely by Joni Mitchell). This comes in the form of the rueful yet shrugging line, “I’ll be on a boat, you’re on a plane going somewhere, same.” In other words, as Dylan put it, “I’m just gonna let you pass/Yes, and I’ll go last/And then time will tell just who has fell/And who’s been left behind/When you go your way and I go mine.”
If Abrams were to guess, though, it seems she thinks she’s the one who will fall, taking ownership of being the “dick” in the situation (Olivia Rodrigo would never). This much is made clear in the bridge, wherein she belts out, “You were the best, but you were the worst/As sick as it sounds, I loved you first/I was a dick, it is what it is/A habit to kick, the age-old curse/I tend to laugh whenever I’m sad/I stare at the crash, it actually works.” And yet, it’s Hobert who pushes her out of the car about midway through the video so that she can truly watch the metaphorical car crash, entering an auditorium to accept the award for Asshole of the Year. In this moment, Abrams surprises viewers by not having the boy who theoretically did her wrong take the stage, but gladly decides to do so herself, claiming the trophy and then ripping the head off of it to sing into it like a mic, confessing all her sins and still wishing that things might have been different. In another sense, Abrams also gives off the Dylan verse, “You say you’re sorry/For tellin’ me stories/That you know I believe are true/Say ya got some other/Other kind of lover/And yes, I believe you do.”
Abrams’ version of that acknowledgement is, “That’s just the way life goes [or, as Janet would say, “That’s the way love goes”]/I like to slam doors closed/Trust me, I know it’s always about me.” This last line mirrors Taylor Swift on “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” as she sings, “So tell me everything is not about me/But what if it is?” And, in another instance of her Swift-like mimicry, Abrams sings, “I push my luck, it shows/Thankful you don’t send someone to kill me.” This also paralleling Swift on “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” when she demands, “Were you sent by someone who wanted me dead?”
And so, no matter which songwriter Abrams is riffing on for “I Love You, I’m Sorry,” she’s made a video that’s at least faintly more unique than the song itself. A lament as old as the 1960s by this point. Fortunately for Abrams, the generation she’s trying to appeal to appears to have no awareness of those forebears who were already saying the same thing. In short, they think Abrams just fell out of a coconut tree.
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