Earlier in June, Gracie Abrams told Billboard that while she and Taylor Swift were writing their duet "us," a fire started in Taylor's apartment, which they barely managed to put out. Then Gracie posted video of the incident on Instagram. While promoting her new album, Gracie gave Apple Music's Zane Lowe a blow-by-blow description of how it all went down.
"We almost burned her house down. Literally," Gracie tells Zane. She says she and Taylor went to dinner and consumed "a lot of alcohol." Back at Taylor's place, they started playing each other songs from their then-unreleased albums; around 2 a.m., they started working on the duet. That's when disaster struck.
Gracie says, "I'd heard a crack from the other room. I was like, 'What is that?' And Taylor was like, 'Oh, it's probably my cat' — whatever. We finished the bridge and we went into the kitchen to get wine, and there was a bonfire on her center island. Truly a huge ball of flame."
"There had been a candle that we had lit when we got home, and it was so hot that it burst," Gracie continues. "And the base of the candle was this wooden tree trunk kind of a thing ... and it was on fire, and it was like 6 in the morning."
Gracie adds, "I don't know how she knew where this was, but [Taylor] runs and grabs a fire extinguisher and for minutes is trying to get it to work and it won't work."
"Eventually she put it out ... and then we both had, like, crazy chest coughs for weeks after."
When Zane asks why it was so difficult for Taylor to work the fire extinguisher, Gracie says, "It could have been that we were drunk."