There is a reason something gets 60,000,000 views on Youtube.
(Don't click the link before reading the rest of this.)
Like most people my age (71), I don’t pay much attention to modern pop music, which is primarily aimed at an adolescent audience. I’m a rocker, play in a blues-oriented band. Suddenly I can’t get enough of one young performer’s music, which seems to have no antecedents or roots. It just is.
I'm a bit behind because this happened a year ago, but it hasn't been mentioned here yet. Last year, 12 year old Grace VanderWaal walked out onto a huge stage, in front of thousands in the building and millions more on TV, a tiny girl in yellow leggings. It was an audition for America's Got Talent. She had no performing history beyond a few “open mikes” in coffee houses. She carried a ukulele. It was a generational moment.
Grace got a ukulele when she was eleven. She learned to play it from YouTube videos. A month or two after starting on the instrument, she thought she might write a song. One year later she walked out on that stage, the first major public performance of her life.
She admitted to the hosts that most of her friends didn't even know she sang. Simon Cowell was clearly skeptical when she said she was going to perform an original song.
She had less than two minutes to make her case. She had to shorten her song a bit to get it in, so she didn't even have the opportunity to present it as she wanted. She was so nervous her voice quaked a little. By the second line of the song the audience was gasping, by the end they were on their feet and cheering for a pre-teen girl with a ukulele.
The song, "I Don't Know My Name," has now been covered hundreds of times by all sorts of musicians, many of them young girls with ukuleles.
Grace VanderWaal is a generational musician, already polished somehow from the very start, unafraid of an audience, which loves her to an extent few performers ever see. The only similar example I can think of was “Little” Stevie Wonder, who burst on the scene as a polished performer at the age of 13, but he was not writing his own material yet. Grace has an unerring sense of arrangement, each song shows dynamic range from a whisper to a shout. A suggested rhythm in her song is enough to get the audience swaying.
I have a friend who has a couple of Grammys for his songwriting, another friend whose songs have been covered by Ringo Starr, Dave Mason and John Mellencamp. They started young, but not THIS young. This little girl, now all of 13 years old, is already a world class songwriter and singer, gifted with perfect pitch and a haunting voice that carries as much emotion as Janis Joplin's, but without the chemical burden. In my mind, she has equaled Carol King as a songwriter, but she is a hundred times better singer.
And I LIKE Carol King.
The beauty of the original link is that it shows something exploding on the world with no preface, something that I expect to be with us a long time and only get better.
Everyone in the building, including Grace, was taken by surprise. Unbelievably mature at 12, this woman will become a musical icon, and this was the moment when she found out -- and the world found out -- that she was better than merely good, she was great.
You can't watch it happen without feeling the the emotion of the moment. I have watched it dozens of times, it never gets old.
After three more appearances, she took home the million dollars for winning the season of America's Got Talent. Not a bad start for a performing career. Three months after a shy girl walked out onstage for an audition, this is what she grew into.
Twelve. Years. Old.
Now 13 years old, she has matured into a confident performer who can walk out onto a stage in a stadium, and rivet the crowd with just her voice and ukulele. Her ensemble now includes a cello, pianist and a drummer who only plays a bass drum and hi-hat, but the accompaniment is kept to a minimum. The kid is clearly in charge.
She is already a great musician. What will happen when she grows up?