Normal Thing

There is a modern variety of longing that the internet has both democratized and complicated beyond recognition. We have always had celebrity crushes, always fallen for people beyond our reach. But digital media has made parasocial attachment feel more personal, more sustained, more laden with an uncanny sense of intimacy. Into this territory steps Normal Thing, the tenth track on Gracie Abrams' second studio album The Secret of Us. This is a song about watching someone on a screen and falling apart over them while knowing, with full clarity, that the feeling has no foundation in mutual reality. It takes that experience seriously without mocking the narrator for having it.

What makes Normal Thing unusual is the particular quality of its self-awareness. The song does not frame its narrator as naive or deluded. Instead, it captures a kind of double consciousness: feeling something deeply while also observing yourself feeling it, unable to shut either mode off. That combination of genuine emotion and analytical remove is both its emotional signature and its cultural insight.

An Album Built From Living

The Secret of Us arrived on June 21, 2024, nearly eighteen months after Abrams' debut album Good Riddance. In the intervening period, Abrams had undergone a dramatic change in scale. From 2023 through 2024, she served as an opening act across 49 dates of Taylor Swift's record-breaking Eras Tour, performing before audiences of 60,000 to 90,000 people night after night.^[1] She has said the experience fundamentally informed how she approached her second album, altering not just her ambitions as a live artist but the kinds of songs she felt ready to write.^[2]

Most of the record was written alongside Abrams' childhood friend and creative partner Audrey Hobert during a period when the two were living together. Abrams has described their collaborative process as converting direct conversation into song, an unusually intimate approach that gave the album its confessional quality even on its more abstract and observational tracks.^[3] Aaron Dessner of The National handled production on much of the record, including Normal Thing. The working relationship with Dessner is built around the idea of space: he has spoken about reminding Abrams that room in music is not silence but structure.^[4]

That spaciousness defines the sonic texture of Normal Thing. The production sits close and low, built around Abrams' voice and spare instrumentation. It does not announce itself. It arrives quietly and stays there, which suits its subject: not grand passion but the kind that accumulates in private, on a couch, in the dark, while a screen glows.

The Territory of Parasocial Love

At its core, Normal Thing is a song about being in love with someone you only know through their public-facing performance. The narrator watches this person on a screen, registers everything about them, and finds herself emotionally undone by it. She is not confused about the nature of the situation. She knows it is constructed. She knows that what she is responding to is, in some sense, a performance rather than a person. And she feels it anyway.^[5]

This is the psychological territory that cultural critics have come to call the parasocial relationship: the one-sided bond that fans form with public figures, in which one party invests genuine emotional energy while the other remains entirely unaware. The phenomenon is not new, but the digital era has intensified it in ways that previous generations would find foreign. Streaming platforms serve the same content on repeat. Social media creates the illusion of direct access. The line between admiring someone's work and believing you know them has become genuinely hard to locate.^[5]

What Abrams captures that less reflective songs about celebrity crushes tend to miss is the self-implicating quality of the experience. Her narrator is not a passive victim of an overwhelming feeling. She is a participant who sees what she is doing and keeps doing it. The song opens by framing this kind of attachment as understandable, then immediately interrogates whether the feelings are genuine or scripted, whether the narrator is really in love or performing love for herself.^[5]

What "Normal" Does to the Title

The title Normal Thing does a great deal of work. It simultaneously normalizes and scrutinizes the experience the song describes. To call something a "normal thing" is to insist it is not embarrassing, not unusual, not worth hiding. But it is also to notice that it might need normalizing, which implies an awareness that it sits slightly outside the ordinary.

Abrams has described the album as a whole as something like an unedited letter to past crushes, an attempt to examine what happens when reality refuses to match daydream.^[2] In that framing, Normal Thing is the album's most philosophically precise moment. Where other tracks on The Secret of Us explore the aftermath of real relationships or the anticipation of ones that might become real, this song sits in a space where the relationship's reality is never even on the table. The narrator is not hoping it will become mutual. She knows it will not. The song is about finding a way to hold that knowledge and continue feeling anyway.

There is a recurring motif of anticipating the next time she will see this person, an acknowledgment that this is a cycle she has entered and cannot easily exit. The pattern is not celebrated but it is not condemned either. The song lets it exist as something human beings do, particularly in an era when the objects of affection are available on demand through a phone screen.

Performance Watching Performance

One of the subtler layers in Normal Thing is its attention to the scripted nature of what the narrator is watching. The song acknowledges that the object of her affection is performing, that what appears on screen is a crafted public persona rather than a private self. But this acknowledgment does not dissolve the feeling. If anything it sharpens the song's central problem: the narrator is moved by something she knows to be constructed, and cannot decide whether that makes the emotion less real or simply more honest about the nature of all emotional connection.

This creates an interesting recursive structure. The object of affection performs. The narrator responds to the performance. The song is Abrams performing the narrator's response. The audience watches Abrams perform someone watching a performance. At each remove, the question of authenticity circles back. Is this feeling real? Are any of the feelings we have in response to art real? The song does not answer these questions directly, but it insists on asking them, which is more interesting.

Abrams herself is a performer who became a subject of her own fans' parasocial attention, particularly after the Eras Tour appearances expanded her visibility dramatically.^[6] The song gains a dimension when you consider that the person singing it understands parasocial attachment from both sides: as the person doing the watching and the person being watched.

The Paul Mescal Theory

Shortly after the album's release, photographs surfaced showing Abrams with Irish actor Paul Mescal at a London restaurant in late June 2024.^[7] Mescal's breakthrough role had been in the 2020 adaptation of Sally Rooney's novel Normal People, which drew enormous audiences during pandemic lockdowns and made him one of the most discussed young actors working in English-language television.

Fans quickly connected the dots. The song's premise of falling for someone encountered only on a screen. The word "normal" in the title and Normal People as Mescal's signature project. The description of watching a performer who does not know you exist. TikTok edits of the two set to Normal Thing accumulated millions of views within days.^[7] Whether the connection is literal autobiography or a satisfying coincidence, it illuminated something about how the song works: it is specific enough to feel personal and universal enough to absorb the stories listeners bring to it.

Abrams has not confirmed or denied the theory, which is itself a kind of answer. She has spoken throughout her career about writing from deeply personal experience while leaving enough interpretive space for listeners to locate themselves in the work.^[3] The song functions regardless of whether its origin story involves Mescal or someone else entirely.

Alternative Readings

The parasocial reading is the most immediately legible, but the song's language is elastic enough to accommodate other interpretations. The screen that separates the narrator from the object of her attention could be understood more metaphorically: as the particular barrier that exists between any two people who are near each other but not actually close. A crush on a coworker you do not know how to approach. A person who exists in your extended social circle, always visible, never reachable.

In this reading, Normal Thing is less about celebrity culture specifically and more about the universal condition of wanting something you can see clearly but cannot touch. The modern context gives it a specific contemporary shape, but the underlying emotion is as old as longing itself.

There is also a reading that places the song in conversation with Abrams' own experience as a performer. Standing on stage before tens of thousands of people projecting feelings onto her, she occupies the role of the person on the screen. Writing a song about being on the other end of that dynamic may be her way of processing what it means to be loved by people who do not know you.

Where It Sits in the Album

At track ten of thirteen, Normal Thing arrives in the back half of an album that has already worked through more recognizable romantic situations: mutual attraction, jealousy, heartbreak, tentative recovery. By the time the listener reaches it, a picture of Abrams' interior emotional world has been established. Normal Thing complicates that picture by introducing a form of longing that cannot be categorized as a conventional relationship at all.

It is the album's most philosophical track: not a story about something that happened, but a reflection on the kinds of feelings that form in the absence of story. The album as a whole is preoccupied with the gap between romantic fantasy and reality.^[1] Normal Thing pushes that preoccupation to its logical extreme: what if the fantasy is the entire thing? What if reality never enters the equation at all?

Residual Power

The cultural moment Normal Thing arrived in was saturated with discourse about parasocial relationships. The pandemic had accelerated the phenomenon, keeping people at home with their screens and their growing sense of intimacy with the people on them. Commentators, therapists, and social media users had begun debating whether parasocial bonds were healthy, whether they displaced real intimacy, whether the feelings were genuine or a form of emotional substitute.

What Abrams does differently from the discourse is refuse to adjudicate. She does not tell us whether the feeling is healthy or harmful, real or artificial, worth having or worth suppressing. She simply renders it with precision and lets it sit there, complex and recognizable, neither celebrated nor apologized for. That refusal to simplify is what gives the song its staying power.^[5]

Live, the song became one of the moments during the Secret of Us World Tour where audiences sang back every word. That collective participation has its own irony: thousands of people who feel personally understood by a song about longing for someone who does not know they exist, singing it together in the presence of the person who wrote it, who also does not know them. The loop of parasocial feeling, reflected and amplified in a room full of strangers.

This is what Abrams gets right that the discourse tends to miss: parasocial feeling is not a malfunction. It is a form of human attention that the contemporary world has given new, strange shapes. Normal Thing does not cure it or condemn it. It simply, precisely, names it. And in the naming, offers the particular relief of being understood.