“The story of my life has been telling myself I can’t do it, but then still doing it, and ‘it’ working out way better than I thought,” says singer-songwriter Grace Enger. The 23-year-old has built a career on that paradox, and on songs that make others feel less lost in their own contradictions. Blending pop, folk, soul, and rock, she crafts songs that approach what she calls “stereotypically shameful emotions” — resentment, insecurity, the taboo of a forbidden crush — with the no-filter intimacy and levity of a heart-to-heart between besties. “I feel like I’m writing songs that I needed to hear when I was younger,” she says, “and maybe that I still need to hear now.”
Enger’s Your Favorite Record EP is full of songs you might need to hear, too. Early single “Give A Little” is a bright, piano-driven bop with forceful guitar strums and horn flourishes. It’s also the kiss-off you wish you’d given an emotionally deadbeat ex, while the wistful “Running Back To You” explains why you can’t stop texting that dud back. Later, the floating “Track 7” trades tough love for self-acceptance: “Well maybe I’m a deep cut / But aren’t those the best ones? / Ones that stick with you forever ever?” By the end, “Falling For You Anyways” sees her opening up again to new experiences. “This project represents a metamorphosis,” Enger says, “my journey of growing up and realizing I don’t have to stick around in situations that don’t serve me.”
It’s an arc that mirrors its creative process. Written in the months after her first headline tour in 2025 (she was back in the studio that Monday), the EP captures a “liminal” headspace, caught between the afterglow of achieving a dream and the anxiety of what comes next. Her support system gone, Enger faced a choice: wait for someone else to make things happen, or do it herself. She chose the latter, stepping into production work she’d always left to others and making demos of new songs — not voice memos, but expansive arrangements with harmonies and strings. “I was telling myself I couldn’t do things alone. You give yourself all the reasons why you shouldn’t: ‘girls don’t produce,’ ‘you should leave it to a guy,’ ‘you need a creative director,’” she says. “But by the end of it, I took the reins on my own project and therefore my own life.”
Enger also wanted Your Favorite Record to feel like the soundtrack of her childhood, listening to John Mayer, Sara Bareilles, Norah Jones, Stevie Wonder — everything her parents would put on in the morning car ride to school in Hoboken, New Jersey. She fell in love with songwriting at age 10 thanks to Taylor Swift’s Red. She was soon penning her own tunes, eventually attending Berklee College of Music’s teen summer program, where she was selected from a thousand applicants to play the institute’s esteemed annual student singer-songwriter showcase.
