Packing It Up

A Quiet Closer, Written After Nearly Giving Up

“Packing It Up” sits at the very end of the October 2024 deluxe edition of The Secret of Us, Gracie Abrams' second studio album, arriving less like a proper single and more like a private admission slipped in after the record has technically finished making its case.^[1] It was co-written and co-produced with Aaron Dessner of The National, whose Long Pond studio and songwriting sensibility have shaped nearly everything Abrams has released since 2021.^[1] Where much of the album leans into fuller, more anthemic pop production, this closing track strips back to something closer to a room recording: acoustic guitar, a vocal kept close and unshowy, very little standing between the listener and the narrator.

The timing surrounding its release matters as much as anything inside the song itself. Through 2023 and into 2024, Abrams opened dozens of shows on Taylor Swift's Eras Tour^[2], a run that introduced her to the largest audiences of her career at the exact moment The Secret of Us was climbing to number one in the UK, Canada, and Australia, and drawing an 80 out of 100 on Metacritic along with a spot on Billboard's 50 Best Albums of 2024.^[1] By the time the deluxe edition appeared, four months after the album's initial June 2024 release, Abrams had spent the better part of a year narrating, night after night, an album largely concerned with the wreckage and confusion of young adult relationships. “Packing It Up,” tucked in as one of the deluxe edition's four additions, plays like the coda that record quietly needed: not another verse about what went wrong, but an account of something that, against the narrator's own expectations, went right.

Abrams has never named who or what inspired the song^[3], but its arrival lined up closely with her going semi-public about a relationship with Irish actor Paul Mescal, whom outlets had linked her to since the middle of 2024.^[3] Coverage of the relationship's early timeline describes a summer of low-key sightings in London, an Instagram-official moment at that year's Glastonbury Festival, and Mescal later turning up in the crowd for one of her New York tour stops^[6], a sequence that lines up closely with the emotional arc the song describes: someone showing up right as she had stopped expecting anyone to. Neither Abrams nor Mescal has confirmed the connection^[3], and that reticence tracks with how both have discussed the relationship publicly since. Mescal has said he wants to protect what is private about it, which makes the song's refusal to name its subject feel less like coyness and more like a consistent, deliberate choice.^[6]

Giving Up, Then Getting Interrupted

What separates “Packing It Up” from most of Abrams' catalog is where it starts. The songs that made her name, from the Minor EP through Good Riddance, generally work forward from a breakup already in progress or already finished: something has collapsed, and the song is the process of sorting through what is left. This track begins somewhere quieter, and in its own way sadder: a narrator who has stopped expecting romantic love to work out at all, who has effectively started closing up the idea of it, only to be interrupted mid-process by exactly the thing she had stopped waiting for.^[4]

The title supplies both the song's central image and its central irony. Packing something up ordinarily signals an ending: a departure, a move, the literal folding-away of a life. Abrams borrows that image to describe the opposite of an ending. Right as she is ready to put away, for good, any hope that love might still find her, a new connection arrives and makes the packing beside the point. The song builds its case for that connection almost entirely through small, domestic detail rather than any grand romantic set piece^[4]: no proposal scene, no dramatic airport reunion, just two people occupying the same ordinary space with an ease that the song treats as more convincing than any declaration would be.

That preference for the unglamorous over the cinematic fits a pattern critics noticed across The Secret of Us more broadly. Rolling Stone and NME both praised the album's sharpened, more confident songwriting while also noting its comfort sitting inside small, specific moments rather than reaching for grand universal statements.^[1] “Packing It Up” takes that tendency to its logical endpoint: its evidence for love is not a speech, it is the plain, slightly unglamorous texture of actually sharing a life with somebody, morning included.

The Pull Between Self-Protection and Being Known

Underneath the song's warmth runs a more anxious current, one recognizable to anyone who has ever half-convinced themselves they no longer want the thing they very much still want. Interpretations of the track describe a narrator caught between the instinct to retreat, to protect herself the way she apparently has in the past, and the slower recognition that this particular relationship is not asking her to perform or reshape herself in order to be loved.^[5] That tension, between self-protection and surrender, is arguably the real subject of the song. The “giving up on love” the title implies turns out to be less about love itself than about the walls she had quietly built around herself, and the song documents the surprise of discovering those walls were optional after all.

That preoccupation is not new for Abrams. Her 2021 single “Mess It Up” described a habit of sabotaging relationships right as they started to go well, retreating from anything that looked like it might actually last, and Abrams has spoken about recognizing that impulse in herself directly. “Packing It Up” can be heard almost as a direct answer to that earlier record: the narrator notices the old urge to run and, this time, chooses to stay through it instead. Heard against that history, the stakes of the song have less to do with meeting someone new than with whether she has grown enough to let herself keep them once they arrive.

Serendipity Versus Ownership

Not every reading of the song is quite so tidy, and it is worth sitting with the less flattering version of its central metaphor. Some interpretations point out that the narrator largely frames this relationship as serendipity, something that simply arrived at the right moment, rather than something she actively pursued or built.^[4] That framing, timing as fate, is emotionally satisfying, but it also sidesteps a question Abrams has engaged with directly elsewhere in her catalog, namely her own agency in whether relationships succeed or fail. Where Good Riddance was explicitly about taking ownership of her part in what went wrong, “Packing It Up” arguably lets her off the hook for the part where things go right, crediting luck and timing rather than any change in herself.

A more generous reading of that same observation is that the song is simply honest about how connection often actually works: not as a project built through effort alone, but as something that depends heavily on timing and on being open enough, in a given moment, to actually notice what is in front of you. Read that way, the “giving up” the song describes is not passive defeat so much as the slow, unglamorous work of arriving somewhere calm enough to recognize something good instead of talking herself out of it, the exact habit “Mess It Up” once confessed to.^[5]

Why a Bonus Track Landed So Hard

For an artist whose profile expanded this quickly, propelled in large part by the Eras Tour platform and by “That's So True” becoming a genuine global hit off the same deluxe release, “Packing It Up” occupies an unusual and valuable place in her catalog.^[2] It was never built for radio, and it was not engineered to go viral the way that song was. Its pull comes from something more old-fashioned: listeners recognizing their own reluctant hope inside somebody else's very specific story, layered with the ongoing, unresolved speculation about the real relationship that seems to sit just behind it without ever being confirmed outright. That gap between what fans think they know and what Abrams has actually said keeps the song circulating on fan forums and social media well past its original release date.^[3]

That kind of speculation has become its own genre of listening in the streaming era. Abrams came of age as an artist inside a fan culture, largely shaped by Taylor Swift's own audience, that treats lyric-decoding as a participatory sport, cross-referencing red carpet appearances and tour-stop cameos against a new verse the way earlier generations might have pored over liner notes. “Packing It Up” rewards that kind of close reading without ever fully satisfying it, which is arguably why it has stayed in circulation: it gives listeners just enough specific, lived-in detail to feel like a real diary entry, while withholding the one detail, a name, that would turn speculation into confirmed fact.

In the end, “Packing It Up” earns its warmth by admitting how close it came to not existing, at least not in the narrator's own expectations. It is a song about the specific vulnerability of setting down your own careful bracing against disappointment, one relationship at a time, and discovering that the thing you had resigned yourself to living without was simply running late. For a songwriter who has spent years narrating the many ways love falls apart, this one is content to describe love actually working, and to sound just a little astonished that it did.