What are your names?
Ella and Wendy!

What is the band’s name?                                      
Our band is GOOD GRIEF.

How did you come up with the band’s name?
Ella: We met in a grief group in 2023 after we both lost our dads. When we began playing music and writing together, it became clear pretty quickly that we both wanted—and needed—this to be an ongoing project. 
Wendy: It was a good thing, but in the wake of profound loss and grief it was also a little hard to make sense of how absurd and important it felt to make music. GOOD GRIEF holds that nuance well for us, and once we landed on it we didn’t look back. 

What is your genre of music?
Wendy: GOOD GRIEF is a blend of folk roots, 90s rock, pop hooks, and queer indie. 
Ella: We’ve had so much fun with the instrumentation through performing and during the recording process. There’s a lot of interplay between acoustic and electric guitars, harmonizing bass lines, and drums that keep the energy and emotion high. 
Wendy: Our queer storylines are also central to the genre. We hope that, through lyrical and thematic complexity, we remain catchy, clear, and cross-generational. 

Give us a little bio about you.
Ella: We like to think of our sound and energy as if Wet Leg and boygenius had a sleepover (including, but not limited to, a bag of chips, prank calls, and a couple cries).
Wendy: Or, to be more verbose: yes, GOOD GRIEF did meet in a virtual grief group—and we’re crying out about it. We became friends and bandmates in 2023 after we both lost our dads. Based in Seattle, GOOD GRIEF weaves the intricate poetics of folk lyricism and a healthy dose of rock angst into a tragi-comic tapestry of love and loss. A dad-given superhero obsession has led us into a multiverse where grief is a perpetual body-double—and a real b*tch. As evident in the title of our upcoming debut album, we are Not Over It.

What made you go into music?
Wendy: We’ve both been writing and performing music in some form since high school, from small solo acts to musical theater ensembles. Music is absolutely in the fabric of how I process every emotion, as a listener and a writer. It’s hard to imagine a life without it at the forefront in some way. And, we both come from musical families. My mom is a storyteller and songwriter—
Ella: —And my dad was always singing (while cooking, driving, phone calling, etc.). Music is one of the (many) most special things I got to share with my dad, and getting to dive more deeply into songwriting and performance with GOOD GRIEF makes me so proud. Wendy and I both also similarly had examples of our parents working day jobs (which we also have) with music as a buzzing passion on the side. It’s been exciting to see GOOD GRIEF grow and evolve into something more than us writing on our couch, and inspiring to dream of where it could go in the future. 

Who are your influences?
Ella: One of the most joyful parts of working together is our different influences. I’ve always gravitated towards folk music (think Brandi Carlile, Billie Marten, Doc Watson) and Wendy is very much in the pop landscape (Charli XCX, MUNA, Chappell Roan). 
Wendy: We find common ground with artists like Wet Leg, Angie McMahon, and Julia Jacklin. We learn so much from each other, and being rooted in such different genres gives us room to explore in our songwriting and recording. 

Are you signed?
Ella: Not yet 🙂

You released your latest single  ‘Lucy’, tell us more about the song.
Wendy: ‘Lucy’ is about a young queer crush, and how a painful narrative I’ve had about my adolescence has changed as I’ve gotten older. When I was a teen I had a relationship with another girl that was romantic, but secretive. She found an ease in dating boys that I couldn’t quite hack. After I had come out years later, I saw that she’d gotten married and had a family—it made me really reflect on my experiences with her and reconcile with and embrace that younger version of myself. 
Ella: While writing ‘Lucy’ together, it was clear that the story had both past angst and shame but present ease and honesty. The song became a message of self-acceptance from the present to the past as we reflect back and hold someone in our minds, even after quite some time.

Describe the track in two words.
Ella: Retroactive acceptance.

Who did you work with on the song?
Wendy: So many incredible musicians! Kayla Pichichero produced the track, and we have Jake Ishler on guitar, Ross Chait on drums, and Neil Wogensen on bass. Math Bishop mixed the project, and Phil Feinman mastered it. Collaborating together was one of the best, transformative experiences.

What was the writing and recording process like?
Ella: Writing together is always a dream. ‘Lucy’ was one of the first songs that we really took apart and reworked after we finished a rough draft of our album. In some ways it led the charge of us honing in on the specificity of what we’re trying to say in each song, and why it’s important to say it in that way.
Wendy: We went into the recording process pretty unsure of where ‘Lucy’ would take us – we’d mostly worked on it as a duo on acoustic guitars, so creating a whole soundscape was a new world for us. As soon as we sat down with Kayla, our producer, and Jake, who composed and performed the guitar lines, the song locked right in. Jake found that high, sparkly, quirky slide sound and ‘Lucy’ really came alive.

Will we see an EP or Album and if so, what can we expect from that as a whole project?
Wendy: We’re working towards our debut album, Not Over It, which is a collection of twelve songs that we’ve written about our lived experiences over the last couple of years through the lens of loss. The album ranges from high energy rock anthems to soft and intimate soliloquies, with stories of how family, friendship, faith, and the fabric of romance all change in the face of grief. 

What else can we expect in 2026?
Ella: We’re so stoked to be performing in Seattle a couple more times this fall and winter – first at Conor Byrne with Jill McCracken on November 19th, and then at the Sunset Tavern on December 15th.
Wendy: We’re also digging into fundraising and grant-writing for our album! And hopefully getting some good rest to greet 2027 with a bang. 

Where do you see yourself in 5 Years?
Wendy: It’s such a good question because this project has largely been about intuiting the next steps as they come. We feel excited to finish recording and releasing our album, alongside performing, writing, collaborating with friends, and hopefully continuing to build and deepen our communities. If or when we end up profiting in any kind of way, we also feel pretty excited to give back to causes we care about. But the exact shape of all of those hopes and dreams is to-be-determined. 
Ella: We’re learning so much about how we want to integrate our music project into the rest of our lives. There are a lot of Seattle musicians we so greatly admire who’ve carved out such a vibrant music scene in this city, and we’re really excited to continue to learn and create in that environment.

What quote or saying do you always stick by?
Wendy: It’s been really important for us—especially since our project is so rooted in the loss of our dads—to define GOOD GRIEF not as making meaning out of death/loss/grief, but of moving in and through our new landscape together.
Ella: It’s not a particular quote, but it’s something we remind each other of often. Especially as we perform and share our project more widely, knowing that grief is both personal and universal, it’s so important to both of us to hold the complexities of living with loss and the strange beauty of getting to do that together.

When you are at a gig, what are 5 things you cannot forget?
Ella: Water bottles, hand-written setlists, small glass hearts as a Dad token (mine in my back pocket, Wendy’s in her boot)…
Wendy: And most certainly my Clinique black honey lip 🙂 

Do you have social media accounts so your fans can follow you?
Yes! You can find us @vgoodgrief across platforms.