Grace Givertz brings Midnight Feature to Town and the City
Walking into The Town and the City Festival, you’re bouncing between rooms all night. Different setups, different volumes, different kinds of attention being asked from you depending on where you end up.
Some sets are built to grab you right away, others may take a minute.
Grace Givertz falls into that second group. Nothing about it feels rushed. The songs unfold at their own pace, and if you stay with them, more starts to come through.
Talking with her, that approach doesn’t feel accidental.
“When I made my first record, Year of the Horse, I realize now that I was trying to cater it to the people who I thought would buy it.”
She doesn’t linger on that point, but it explains a lot of what comes after. There’s a difference between writing toward an audience and writing from a place you actually recognize as your own. Midnight Feature sits firmly in that second space.
The way she built the record reflects that shift. The collaborators weren’t chosen randomly or out of convenience. It was intentional, and it carries weight without needing to be spelled out every step of the way.
“In order for Midnight Feature to feel truly authentic to me, I had to make the commitment to myself and my community to uplift the voices that even I have, subconsciously, been a part of silencing.”
You can hear that in how the songs hold together. They don’t try to smooth things out or make themselves easier to step into. They feel settled, like they’ve already worked through what they needed to before you got there.
A lot of that comes back to how she writes in the first place. The language isn’t something added after the fact.
“Living with chronic illness is something that is often hard to explain unless you’ve experienced it,” she says.
That line sits at the center of it. The metaphors come from trying to make something understood in real life before it ever becomes a song. It gives the writing a different kind of weight. Not heavier, just more grounded in something that already had to make sense outside of music.
That carries into how she thinks about playing live.
“My goal is always to make sure that at least one person in the audience feels heard.”
It’s a small target, but it changes the way you listen. There’s no push to open everything up or make it land for everyone in the room. The songs stay specific, and that specificity does the work.
The setup of the festival helps with that. Smaller rooms, closer sets, the ability to stay put for a minute without feeling like you’re missing something across town. It gives songs like hers space to actually exist the way they were written.
Away from the stage, the way she talks about Boston feels just as steady. No big claims about changing anything overnight. She’s building something alongside what’s already there. Working with groups like Black Opry and FWAAMFest, bringing in artists, widening the circle in a way that feels active instead of reactive.
The record itself took its time, and it sounds like it.
“Writing and recording Midnight Feature over the last 6 years really absorbed a lot of my creative energy and I just now feel like I’m recovering.”
That kind of timeline leaves a mark. Even after one spin, you can tell how much went into it.
If you’re at The Town and the City Festival on Saturday, I’d make a point to be at lala books at 7:45 for Grace Givertz. It’s one I wouldn’t skip.