In order to take control of your future, you have to come to terms with your past — and that's the message behind "Family Line," the powerful fulcrum of Conan Gray's newest album, Superache.
The song finds the pop singer/songwriter tracing his roots and personality traits back to their source: A turbulent childhood. Each line lays out some aspect of childhood trauma in stark, unsparing detail, and the song's chorus traces back all his faults and attributes to something in his mother or father.
In this episode of Press Play at Home, Gray gives the song an acoustic treatment, strumming his guitar along to the emotional lyrics as he sits in an empty room. The barren white-walled performance space helps keep the focus on the song's cutting lyrics and excavation of the past.
"How could you hurt a little kid?/ I can't forget, I can't forgive you/ 'Cause now I'm scared that everyone I love will leave me," Gray sings in one particularly hard-hitting verse, directed toward a father who is troubled, abusive and often absent.
It's unclear exactly how autobiographical the song is, but as he explained to GRAMMY.com in June, being honest and vulnerable results in the best songwriting. "The only way you can really connect with people is by telling them a human experience," he said.
"Family Line" comes off Gray's second studio album, Superache, a collection of personal and intimately crafted tracks also featuring singles such as "Yours" and "Memories." After sharing the story of his teen years on his 2020 debut, Kid Krow, Gray called the Superache creation process "an experience of scraping my ribs of any last information that I had to say."
Press play above to watch Gray's powerful and intimate "Family Line" performances, and keep checking back to GRAMMY.com for more episodes of Press Play at Home.