On his debut album, the singer-songwriter refuses the traditional grief record, turning instead toward fatherhood, PTSD, survival, and the strange ordinariness of hope

There is the moment everything changes, and then there is everything that comes after.

For Andy Gruhin, that distinction became the foundation of his debut album, Hannah, arriving September 18. Written following the death of his wife six months after the birth of their first child, the ten-track record could easily have become a memorial. Gruhin consciously refused to make one.

“Everyone writes about the explosion. Nobody writes about the smoke,” he says.

It is perhaps the clearest way into Hannah. Rather than attempting to preserve his wife in melody or transform unimaginable loss into something neat enough to fit inside a song, Gruhin became interested in the person forced to continue living afterward. PTSD, paranoia, guilt, nightmares, rage, fatherhood, emptiness and even hope all occupy the record without being arranged into an easy redemption narrative.

“Hannah is simply the catalyst,” Gruhin explains. “The album is about becoming someone you never auditioned to be.”

That philosophy makes the album’s latest single, “Bobby,” featuring Alejandro Aranda, particularly significant. It is the rare moment on Hannah where Gruhin directly turns toward who his wife was. Written for their son, the song is less about Gruhin processing his own loss than preserving something his child was too young to consciously remember.

“One day my toddler is going to become old enough to realize all of this happened to him before he became truly conscious,” Gruhin says. “I was bottling lightning before it disappeared.”

Across Hannah, Gruhin’s singer-songwriter roots collide with the emotional volatility of emo and alternative rock. Alongside Aranda, the record features Aaron Gillespie of Underoath, Arnie Woods and Elijah Gibb. But beneath the distortion and collaborations is an album fundamentally concerned with communication: not fixing grief, explaining it or offering instructions for surviving it, but simply making it visible.

Mundane spoke with Gruhin about refusing to turn his wife into a monument, writing “Bobby” for his son, collaborating with Alejandro Aranda and Aaron Gillespie, why genre is “filing paperwork after the crime,” and how grief transformed his understanding of hope.

Andy Gruhin: “Grief Doesn’t Need Answers Nearly as Much as It Needs Witnesses”

MUNDANE: Hannah could easily have become an album memorializing your wife, but instead you chose to focus largely on everything that happened after her death. Why was it important to write about the aftermath rather than the loss itself?

ANDY GRUHIN: Everyone writes about the explosion. Nobody writes about the smoke. Usually, it’s because the aftermath of it all is too painful. The day Hannah died was violent in the cosmic sense of the word. It ripped a hole in the fabric of my reality clean enough that there was a version of me before it and a version after it. They are mostly strangers to one another.

I had no interest in building a marble statue to my wife. Because choosing to still be alive and continue is my marble statue. In my opinion, songs like that are extremely hollow because words and melody don’t replace life. Hannah is simply the catalyst. The album is about becoming someone you never auditioned to be.

MUNDANE: “Bobby” is the exception—the moment where Hannah herself becomes directly present. Knowing that your son will one day hear this song and understand its meaning, how did that responsibility affect the way you wrote it?

ANDY GRUHIN: I had a lot of difficulty writing that song. It’s the only song where I really even talk about who Hannah was or show her visually. Every song on the album allowed me to be selfish. Bobby did not. It’s not a song intended to be mine.

One day my toddler is going to become old enough to realize all of this happened to him before he became truly conscious. Imagine experiencing that. I was bottling lightning before it disappeared.

MUNDANE: Songs like “PTSD” confront the psychological aftermath of grief without dressing it up. Did songwriting help you understand what was happening internally, or was it more about giving those emotions somewhere to exist?

ANDY GRUHIN: Living through grief is like getting caught in the ocean during a storm on a piece of driftwood. Writing songs to me is staying afloat long enough to realize the waves have names. PTSD. Paranoia. Guilt. Nightmares. Rage. Love. Emptiness. Hope. Hopelessness.

When you stop screaming that you’re drowning, you start recognizing what keeps pulling you under. This is one of the only honest conversations grief allowed me to have with myself.

Screenshot

MUNDANE: There’s enormous love on this record, but also anger, fear and resentment. Did making Hannah change your understanding of how seemingly contradictory emotions can coexist inside grief?

ANDY GRUHIN: People love binaries. Life does not work in binaries. Neither feeling cancels the other. They just share the same blood.

MUNDANE: “Bobby” features Alejandro Aranda, while Aaron Gillespie appears on “Safe.” What made them the right people to enter something this personal, and how did their presence change the songs?

ANDY GRUHIN: Bobby is an extremely personal song. I did NOT want to fuck it up. And the only way to guarantee that was to bring on the most talented person I knew. Alejandro Aranda is that guy. So talented it’s not fair. It was extremely humbling to be in the studio with him.

And Aaron? When the opportunity arose to have one of my childhood heroes sing on one of my songs, you just don’t say no to that. They’re Only Chasing Safety is one of the best albums ever. So, having Aaron be a part of this was humbling.

And the beautiful thing is neither Alejandro nor Aaron tried to leave their fingerprints all over the songs. They simply helped me carry the weight. And I am eternally grateful.

But don’t forget Arnie Woods and Eli Gibb. They are features on the record too. I only wanted the best of the best on this album. And I feel confident that I achieved that. Bobby Raps was going to be on the album too, but timing complicated things. I hope we’ll make something together in the future. He’s one of my favorite artists and producers.

MUNDANE: The album sits somewhere between classic singer-songwriter storytelling and modern emo. Do those genre distinctions matter to you, particularly when the material is this personal?

ANDY GRUHIN: People have told me I’ve been an emo artist for 17 years, but my inspiration came from Damien Rice, Elliot Smith, Matt Nathanson, and Springsteen long before I even listened to my favorite bands ever, Say Anything, Jimmy Eat World, Title Fight, Taking Back Sunday, Life On Repeat, The Used, The Story So Far and more.

I have always considered myself to be a singer songwriter. I just do it a bit more…aggressively.

Genre has always felt like filing paperwork after the crime has already been committed. I never sit down and say, “Oh, today I’m gonna write a song in this genre.” When I sit down—more like if I ever feel inspired enough to sit down—I try to tell the truth. That is the only musical tradition I’ve ever understood.

MUNDANE: The album moves through different manifestations of grief—trauma, fear, memory, fatherhood, eventually even hope. Were there specific moments in your life that dictated the sequencing of those emotions?

ANDY GRUHIN: There are no moments. It’s all just one single, blurred, faded day. Three years ago feels like yesterday and yesterday feels like forever ago.

I made no decisions on moments in my journey. The word journey is hollow in itself. I just wandered from room to room until I had a melody and lyrics in my head.

MUNDANE: After experiencing something that fundamentally divided your life into a “before” and “after,” what does hope actually mean to you now?

ANDY GRUHIN: Hope used to feel cinematic and fetishized. Now it feels ordinary.

Hope isn’t this big event. It’s waking up and not hating yourself that day. It’s paying your bills on time. It’s not having one strange text or phone call ruin your entire day. It’s lifting heavy things. It’s making a song even if it sounds like shit. It’s playing a video game that takes your mind away from everything for a moment. It’s hearing your kid say words you didn’t hear the day before.

I hate that that is what hope has turned into for me, but at the same time there is something profoundly sacred about it.

MUNDANE: “Bobby” will inevitably mean something very different to your son as he gets older. Years from now, what do you hope he understands about his father when he hears it?

ANDY GRUHIN: I hope he understands that he was not the reason I survived, but the reason survival became meaningful to me.

I don’t care if he ever understands how broken I was, but I do hope that whenever he becomes a father someday, if life ever attempts to convince him that love isn’t worth the risk, I hope my song quietly argues the opposite if given the chance.

MUNDANE: There will inevitably be listeners who come to Hannah carrying losses of their own. What do you hope this record can offer someone who recognizes themselves somewhere inside it?

ANDY GRUHIN: Respectfully, I did not write this for all of those people experiencing pain. I don’t want this album to “fix anyone” or even attempt to.

Music has been unfairly asked to become therapy, politics, religion, and medicine simultaneously since humans started hitting drums. In my opinion, music is none of those things. It’s communication. That’s it.

Grief doesn’t need answers nearly as much as it needs witnesses. And maybe that’s all music, maybe all of art has ever been, since the dawn of time. One human lighting a fire in the dark so somebody, anybody, knows they’re not the only person in the room.

There is no promise at the end of Hannah that everything eventually makes sense. Gruhin isn’t particularly interested in manufacturing one.

What he offers instead feels considerably harder to articulate: survival stripped of its cinematic mythology. Sometimes hope is not transcendence. Sometimes it is paying a bill, lifting something heavy, playing a video game, writing a bad song, or noticing that your child learned a new word.

And perhaps that is why Gruhin’s description of music as communication rather than medicine feels so essential to Hannah. The record doesn’t claim to heal its creator, much less its audience. It documents someone attempting to recognize the waves while he is still inside the storm.

The fire Gruhin describes at the end of our conversation doesn’t illuminate an exit.

It simply tells whoever happens to see it: someone else is in the room.