“It's Time”

Gracie Coates and Rachel Ruggles met in a dance class at Berkeley High School, at 16 or 17, when they were told to write a song together for the class show. Coates went on to Berklee, Ruggles to classical violin at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, and they rehearsed over Skype until they moved across the country to a loft in Bushwick, Brooklyn, which became their home and their studio. “It’s Time” is the sixth of nine songs on their self-titled debut, released by United For Opportunity on 23 June 2017.

By the duo’s account, they made the core of the record in that loft and then built it up in several studios with different collaborators, keeping piano, violin and voice as the bones of every song. The two of them wrote “It’s Time”. Garrett Eaton produced it, Steve Wall mixed it and added production, and Greg Giorgio did further mixing and production, with the duo credited as co-producers. Across the album Coates sings lead and plays piano, Ruggles plays violin and sings, and Eaton adds percussion, bass, synthesizers and backing vocals.

The lyric is about conformity. Its narrator has “something valid to say” and says nothing, does as told, moves like a machine plugged into computers and television screens, and is offered a choice between left and right that is “just black and white”. The second verse ends on programmers who “have already decided exactly what I’m good for”. The chorus turns from feeling paralysed to a promise to stand up, say what others won’t and do it her own way. The official lyric video went up on the duo’s YouTube channel on 6 June 2017, produced by Persistent Productions, and like every video and photo shoot for the album it is in black and white.

Within days of the album’s release, All Songs Considered listeners voted Gracie and Rachel fourth in a poll of their favourite new artists of 2017, Bob Boilen later put the record in his top ten of the year, and in November they played a Tiny Desk Concert. Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records released their second album in 2020 and If We Could, Would We in April 2026. The duo described their debut as a record that moves from anxious voices toward “empowered growth”, and “It’s Time” is the song where that turn happens, in a chorus that answers its own verses.