American actress and talented singer Mckenna Grace releases a brand new single “do all my friends hate me?” featured along with a music video
Mckenna premiered the official video via her YouTube last night. The impressively cinematic video was conceived and co-directed by Mckenna Grace in collaboration with Gus Black. The song is out now on DSPs.
Mckenna says, “I have really bad anxiety when it comes to my friends, and I’m always worried they secretly hate me or are annoyed with me,” she says. “I wrote that song while I was stuck in a two-week quarantine before a shoot in Canada. None of my friends were calling or texting me back, and it was all I had to focus on. I just felt so insecure, isolated and sad.”
“It is very hard sometimes to turn negative thoughts into helpful ones, but I have found a lot of helpful tools from the JED Foundation for me and my friends when we are feeling down,” she says. Mckenna will be a guest on an upcoming episode of Jenna Andrews’ mental health chat show, The Green Room. Jenna – whose co-writing credits include BTS, Drake and Ed Sheeran – co-wrote the song with Mckenna along with Rachel Kanner (Katy Perry, R3HAB, Maggie Lindemann), and producer Cody Tarpley (Lennon Stella, Megan Thee Stallion, Noah Cyrus). In bringing the track to life, Mckenna and Cody worked on layering in the idiosyncratic details such as the lonely sound of a phone ringing with no answer. “I love to write songs that you can cry to but also totally jam out, like with ‘Haunted House,’” she notes, “but with ‘do all my friends hate me?’ I really just wanted to focus on making it as sad and dramatic as possible.”
“Haunted House” has garnered over 5.6 million streams across DSPs and has sailed high in the Shazam charts around the globe. The song was used as the end credit theme in Jason Reitman’s lauded Ghostbusters: Afterlife, in which Mckenna stars as a whip-smart young ghostbuster in what critics called a “revelatory, star-making performance.”
Behind the scenes, Mckenna has been nurturing her passion for songwriting. Since teaching herself ukulele at the age of 11, she has spent much of her time on set and off, writing music. During the pandemic, Mckenna immersed herself in songwriting to cope with the isolation of lockdown, teasing out songs on piano and guitar.
As she generated more material, Mckenna also began collaborating with co-writers, constantly sharpening her process to create songs both intensely specific and undeniably resonant. Once the world opened back up and her acting resumed, she used every moment of free time on set to work on her music, eventually inking a deal with Photo Finish Records in 2020. She recently finished filming the sequel to The Bad Seed which she produced and wrote the screenplay for during the pandemic.
