#the backsteps

Recently, a Change.org petition was brought to the attention of the music world. It was started by a fan of the pop singer Gracie Abrams, who has seen her star rise in recent years on the back of support slots where she opened for major pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift in stadiums around the world. A successful debut album followed, 2024’s The Secret of Us, with Billboard chart-topping hit singles like ‘That’s So True’ and features on Saturday Night Live, and this newfound fame (as well as being the daughter of Hollywood filmmaker and composer JJ Abrams, whose credits, amongst other high-profile movies, include recent Star Wars and Star Trek productions) meant that when the 25-year-old musician announced her own solo headline tour for 2025 to promote her debut album, she would be mapping her way through large arenas across North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

Gracie Abrams performing live. (Credit: Getty Images)

On the European leg of the tour, Abrams has chosen the American bedroom pop musician Dora Jar as an opener for the tour kicking off next month in Spain. Dora Jar (a shortened version of her real name Dora Jarkowski, and not, as I had mistakenly thought, a clever wordplay on the phrase ‘door ajar’) released her first EPs in 2021, and has since gone from strength to strength, opening for Billie Eilish in 2022 and subsequently joining Manchester indie pop behemoths The 1975’s stadium tour in 2023. She has had breakthrough artists like Conan Gray and Remi Wolf shower praise on her artistry, and released her debut album, No Way to Relax When You Are on Fire last September to favourable reviews.

None of this however, was enough for one fan. As a story broken by Stereogum earlier this week revealed, the fan started a Change.org petition to have Dora Jar replaced as the opener on Gracie Abrams’ European tour.

Their petition begins, “Many fans, including myself, are baffled by the recent announcement that Dora Jar will be the opening act for The Secret of Us Tour’s Europe Shows. We are perplexed as we do not recognize her, and with less than two weeks till the tour, it’s virtually impossible to familiarize ourselves with her slow-paced songs. For a memorable concert experience, an opening act should set the mood and get the crowd excited, but Dora’s slow tempo songs may not achieve this goal.”

Dora Jar. (Credit: Uncut Magazine)

The petition goes on to cite a Billboard report about the importance of a good opener to set the mood, but completely disregards the long-standing tradition of headline acts picking smaller, sometimes virtually unknown artists to open for them. The purpose of an opening slot has always been to give this smaller artist who the headliner believes in, a chance to prove themselves before a larger audience that may never have found them otherwise. Before she was a household name, pop sensation Chappell Roan was an unknown artist opening for the likes of Declan McKenna in 2018. Her rise in fact was partially due to a wildly successful stint opening for Olivia Rodrigo, as was Abrams’ herself. The opening slot has long been the making and beginning of many a successful career. The music industry relies on it to have the next crop of emerging talent ready for the big stages (and big bucks). It keeps the wheels in motion in many performing industries, be they music or comedy.

Chappell Roan at Osheaga 2024. The popstar, who had been booked before her rise to fame for a 3:30 PM slot, was watched by 30,000 people, the biggest afternoon crowd the festival has ever seen. (Credit: Tim Snow, OSHEAGA press assets)

As such, there is simple, established gig etiquette: you don’t control the choice of opener, and you can just come late if you really don’t want to see them.

Now I will say, especially for a fan of pop music, a world that has been steeped in idolatry ever since there have been pop stars (what we now call ‘stan culture’), there is pressure to know everything about the artists you like in order to show that you’re ‘truly’ a fan. In fact, this is not exclusive to pop music. Rock and punk music have flung ‘poseur’ accusations for ages. It is somewhat understandable that a fan on the barricade may be worried that an opener may see them not singing along, but here’s the thing: artists know what it means to be an opener. They understand that the people at the show are often new to their music. They come with the mindset that they want to warm up the crowd, and if possible create new fans by exposing them to their music.

I suspect that the petition comes from a younger fan, and pop music often finds that its demographic is younger than any other genre of music. It is possible that this might be the petitioner’s first concert, or first handful of concerts. With the way music funding has been changing over the last few decades, we are also seeing more and more venues relying on drink sales to keep their doors open, but this has also meant an alarming decline in the ubiquity of all-ages venues. So it is possible that for a younger fan, the only shows they really get to experience are the big-ticketed ones, where the ticket price makes up a larger share of the venue’s revenue. I can’t fully blame them for expecting heaven and earth in three hours if they’re paying well over €100 for some of these shows.

€100... €200? $5000? Gracie Abrams performing with Taylor Swift at Wembley Stadium, London.

But one of the best musical experiences is when you walk into a venue with no expectations and walk out having discovered your favourite new artist. Some of the best nights of my life have been out in a small club or theatre, having my mind blown and learning new ways of experiencing music seeing artists I knew nothing about. It expands your horizons like few other things can.

Often, these smaller artists also come and hang out after the show, and you get to learn about them directly from talking to them. And best of all, if they do blow up, you get to say you were there first! I recently got a ton of alarmed, excited messages from admiring friends when I posted a picture of me and Móglaí Bap, one of the rappers in the Irish hip hop trio Kneecap. I saw them last year at a smaller venue in Toronto, and even for a then-pretty successful and talked-about group, they have had an incredible year since since: a multiple BAFTA-winning, Oscar-shortlisted film, televised festival slots, larger shows and of course, plenty of newspaper headlines. I highly doubt I will be able to speak to them when they return to Toronto this autumn!

Belfast rap trio Kneecap. Toronto, 2024. Can't show you the pic with the band without doxxing myself, so you won't see that one.

If you come early, stick around for the opener and don’t like what you hear, that’s also fine! When I saw Pulp last year on their comeback North American tour, they had the rock duo ESCAPE-ISM as openers, whose act seemed to walk the line between shambolic rock pomp and satire. I had more chats with Pulp fans about what they thought of the opener than I talked to them about Pulp, and the word ‘cringe’ and the phrase ‘how did they get this gig’ were thrown about often. But no one interrupted the band, or petitioned for them to get off the tour. Some people found this a good time to get get a drink or check out merchandise. You can listen and either appreciate it or know that you have the choice to never listen to them again once you leave the venue. To demand that an opener you are not actually paying to see be removed from the tour because they are not to your personal liking is just self-centred.

ESCAPE-ISM’s Ian Svenonius live, opening for Pulp.

People sometimes wonder why it’s hard for new musicians to draw huge crowds. I suspect that in part, it is because over the last decade, we’ve all become very conditioned to needing to know everything in advance.

The comfort of familiarity.

Reruns, remakes, remasters. You have to watch every Marvel film in order, to understand the newest unmissable one. 20th anniversary remaster tops the charts, 30th anniversary reunion tour is the only show you’ve been to all year (its tickets were expensive, so now you won’t spend $15 at a local show). As an audience, not only has our maturity been written off, but producers (and particularly financiers) of media have become so obsessed with coddling audiences for familiarity, that our culture has been the biggest loser for it.

No one wants to take a chance on new things anymore. Newness is risky, and that is bad for business. The same radio stations that once boasted that they played the ‘hottest new names in music’ and magazines that proudly printed ‘We were the first to discover and ‘break’ this band into the mainstream’ have spent the last year fishing for the smallest Oasis reunion stories, while their posts on newcomers languish at a tenth of the popularity, or are overrun with comments proudly proclaiming that they don’t know an artist.

Ironically enough, we simultaneously must know everything, and if someone doesn’t know you, you must be a failure. Where not knowing a cool new artist used to once mean that you would quietly pick up the latest copy of the NME and furtively buy a single so you too could see what the fuss was all about and be ‘in’ with the cool kids, some now think that withholding their coveted patronage from the emerging arts is their damning indictment of the current state of music. When in reality, all it reflects is a buying public that has not ventured outside its comfort zone since their twenties, now 20-30 years ago.

The name sells, familiarity is a business strategy, and this is capitalised upon not just in pop culture industries: the inability to accept and process new information is leading to people doubling down on misinformation and outdated, misguided beliefs because they don’t like new and unfamiliar information (be it on bigotry, false biology or fantasies about ‘immigrants’).

And I suppose sometimes, it manifests itself like this: in people who are going to see an artist who has released just one album, and who herself was discovered by many fans through opening for Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift, who are complaining about a new artist they don’t yet know who has potentially landed the biggest breakthrough of her career, because they’re not ‘familiarized with her work’.

Gracie Abrams with Taylor Swift in Toronto on the Eras tour, 2024. (People Magazine)

I should note that for her part, Gracie Abrams immediately shut down any ideas of replacing Dora Jar on the tour as ‘absolute ridiculousness’ and ‘wildly uncool’ in a comment on the same Stereogum post on Instagram. She went on to call Dora a ‘talented wonder’ and encouraged her fans to stream her music regardless of whether they were seeing them on tour or not.

As for her worried fans? I have a bit of advice. Dora has one album out. Put it on and listen to it start to finish on the bus back from school. Go for a 40-minute walk or a run with the album on (the LP’s runtime is 39 minutes 29 seconds). Let yourself discover the joys of the album as a medium of art, rather than a collection of singles. And allow yourself to be exposed to new delights. Explore a little. Your favourite artist was once new and unfamiliar to you too! A friend of mine has recently been challenging herself to listen to one new album a day for the whole month.

You don’t have to know every single word to have a good time. A concert is a magical experience that brings not just the words of the songs, but the emotions and sentiment of the music alive. There’s something about hearing the sound coming out of those large speakers all around you, something about the artist singing it at you rather than it coming from your phone or vinyl, something about experiencing music together with thousands (or tens, if you like small shows) of fellow fans, that is a completely different experience to listening to recorded music.

Some of my happiest musical memories are in small venues. Artists in order: The Backsteps, Clay Pigeons, Last Call, Sons of Rick (not all with releases out yet)

Not worse, just different. Allow yourself to simply become a fan of music, in all the different forms, and you’ll have a great time no matter who is playing or how you’re listening to them.