Exclusive Interview: Grant Knoche Talks Good Luck Getting Over Me, How “Move” Landed With TWICE, and Producing ADÉLA’s “Superscar”
After years of dancing, writing, and learning how to produce his own music, Grant Knoche is giving dance a bigger place on Good Luck Getting Over Me. We caught up with him to talk about the making of the album, including how a song he’d planned to release himself ended up with TWICE, what recording with Kidz Bop taught him about writing pop songs, and how it felt to watch a track he’d made in his bedroom reach a festival crowd.
Grant was about a month away from releasing “Move” when he found out TWICE wanted to record it. He already had a music video treatment ready and knew he wanted the song to introduce the album. With “Move” going to TWICE, he went into another session and wrote “Autopilot” that day. The lead single had changed, but he still wanted to make an album that gave him as much room to dance as “Move” did.
We went back to how Grant got started, long before he was making records of his own. He began dancing at seven, taking ballet, contemporary, and hip-hop. At home, he taught himself Adele songs on the piano and eventually started singing along. By ten, he was touring with Kidz Bop, where he’d go on to record twelve albums and spend plenty of time watching producers work over their shoulders. He calls it a “songwriting education.” By eleven, he was already trying things out in GarageBand.
“It was a free trial, in a way,” Grant joked. By the time his run with Kidz Bop ended, he’d seen what it was like to spend long days in the studio and go out on tour. He wanted to keep going. “Yeah, let’s do it.”
It took him a little longer to figure out what he wanted to write about. At fourteen, he was recording other people’s demos about being cheated on before he’d ever been in a relationship. Learning to produce gave him the time to work out what he wanted to say and how he wanted it to sound. “I could spend a whole week and not affect anybody else's time, and just get to experiment and play around with sound,” he explained.
That freedom came up again when we talked about “Move.” Grant originally wrote it for a potential sync placement, so he could spend the session making something he liked without having to decide if it belonged on his own record. “You kind of turn your artist's mind off,” he said. Of course, once he heard what he’d made, he wanted to keep it. Even after the song went to TWICE, he knew there was more he wanted to do with that sound.
When we asked about the title Good Luck Getting Over Me, Grant brought up the difference between the two albums. He described I Could Die Just Thinking of Us as having a “crying in the club” feeling. This time, he wanted dance breaks and songs he could put on at a party with friends. He liked that the title was long, just like his last one, and it had the attitude he wanted for this record. Once the motorcycle and gear came together for the artwork, he could see that side of the album, too.
From there, we got into how Grant knows when to keep an early vocal. Producing his own songs means he can go back and change a take whenever he wants, and he’s had plenty of chances to hear what can get lost in the process. “I’ve gone back trying to re-record something,” he said, “and I’m like, it doesn’t… it sounds like you’re trying too hard.”
He thought of “Please Hurry,” from I Could Die Just Thinking of Us. He and his ex had kept talking after their breakup until they finally agreed they needed to stop. Grant went into a writing session just after sending that last message. “I'd sent that last message of, like, alright, you know, bye, and it was so hard, and I remember being in the session, and I was bawling my eyes out, and that song, we wrote it in about an hour or something.”
After his collaborators left, he stayed behind to record, crying between takes. “I think it’s really important to kind of keep those moments,” he shared. It’s something he pays attention to when he works with other artists, too. Some singers like to live with a song before coming back to record it. If an early take already has a feeling he thinks someone will hear and recognize, he’ll make a case for keeping it.
We also wanted to know how sharing something as personal as “First Hello” shaped what he was comfortable putting into a song. After Grant shared his coming-out story, people reached out to tell him they’d used the song to come out to their parents. Others said it had helped save their lives. He wanted listeners to be able to bring whatever they’d been holding in to the song. “It's just a secret that you have that you're releasing,” he explained. “You’re introducing yourself as a new person.”
On “Stripped,” Grant was thinking about what happens after you let people in. “How much of myself do I have to strip back for you to really see all of me?” he asked. The video takes that question literally, with Grant shedding layers until he’s peeling away his own skin. As we talked about the video, he pulled up screenshots of comments from people who were still focused on his body. There was some humor in scrolling through them with him, especially after hearing what he’d wanted the video to say.
We asked Grant what it was like to work on “Superscar” with ADÉLA when they both came from dance. He was making Good Luck Getting Over Me at the time, so the question of what makes a song feel good to move to was already on his mind. “I understand, like, musicality and rhythm and what makes people move,” he said. When he gets excited about a track before he’s even out of his chair, he has a feeling it might do the same for someone else.
He got to see that for himself when he watched footage of ADÉLA performing “Superscar” at a festival. He knew the song from hours spent working on it in his bedroom. Seeing it from the crowd’s perspective, with the track coming through festival speakers and people dancing to it, made the whole thing feel a little surreal.
There’s another part of producing for someone else that Grant gets excited about. When listeners tell him they can hear his style in a song, he thinks about the writers and producers he recognizes the same way.
“That's cool to hear, because I'm like, that's what I've always wanted to build. Like, I think there's times where, like, I can listen to a song and be like, Ed Sheeran totally wrote this, or Julia Michaels totally wrote this, or like… Timbaland totally produced this. Like, there's so many… I want to be able to have that kind of thing at some point, and have my own style of things, and for people to be able to recognize that.”
When we turned back to Good Luck Getting Over Me, Grant talked about trusting his own taste. “It’s my artist project, and what I want to say, and what I want to feel in it,” he said. On this album, that meant making room for the dancer he’s been since he was seven, right down to the breakdowns he’d been wanting to put in his songs. He’s already teasing another album, but for now, he’s given us a record we can put on with friends and dance to, just like he hoped.
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