Well where to start?
It’s a bit hard to tell the story of Grace, as there’s a lot to tell. We could start at the beginning, when she was young first learning ‘ring a ring a roses’ on piano. Or when she had to wait for her ‘baby’ teeth to fall out to start playing French Horn, which years later led to her playing music from composers like Phillip Spark and Frank Ticheli across Europe in various orchestral ensembles.
Maybe then a good place to start would be at 18 when she wondered what on earth she was doing playing Rachmanioff and Gershwin, when what she really wanted to do was crank up an amp and learn some Opeth, or perhaps try and figure out what that rhythm is Chris Squire was playing on Yes’ ‘Drama’ record – so even more instruments started to get swept into the fold as her grasp of progressive rock and metal gradually turned into a permanent epoxy bond in her brain.
In fact on her debut full length album ‘The World is Dying’, everything except drums and strings is all Grace’s own compositions, performances, recordings, programming, and writing. To prove not to others, but mostly to herself that “Yes, I can do all of these things if I put my mind to it”.
“It’s tough putting together a full length record all by yourself, you have no one to bounce off of. Especially when you’re just starting out, it’s hard to know what works and what doesn’t during the writing process, and how a hypothetical audience will receive what is in effect a rather self indulgent compositional exercise.” – it is very rare nowadays that an artist has complete creative control over an album of this scale and ambition.
After spending many years going to hundreds of concerts, listening to all sorts of weird and whacky artists, finally the pandemic allowed time for Grace to get her metaphorical shit together and start writing music that she wanted to hear as an amalgamation of everything that has ever wormed its way into her ears. Rammstein, Haken, Genesis, Poulenc, Black Sabbath, Black Midi, Dodie, Devin Townsend, Rick Wakeman, the list goes on, and on, and on – and there are most certainly nods to all of those artists in her work as a sign of respect for who came before.
“I didn’t leave the house for 18 months until the vaccines were ready whilst looking after my Grandad, who is thankfully still with us, and in that time I wrote a good chunk of this record – as well as my debut EP”.
Drums for the record were performed and composed by Robin Johnson, and recorded by Shelby Logan Warne back at the start of 2022 as song structures settled, and the demos slowly got re-recorded once again from the ground up, and synth parts gradually got more complex and sonically oversaturated – alongside tracking sessions for harp and strings in 2023, french horn, piano, and vocals in 2024 as Grace and Shelby finally took over Sensible Music Studios in London which allowed for the studio space to get those last bits over the line somewhere in between 80 hour work weeks running around for artists such as ‘The Plot in You’, ‘Tim Bowness’, and ‘Fontaines D.C.’.
But what is the record actually about? Well, ‘The World is Dying’ is more science fiction turned horrid reality. The pushback of the disparity of economic capital on planet earth. Watching idiotic figures like ‘Elon Musk’ waste our planet’s resources to jet off to Mars for his own personal masturbatory pleasure, leaving the rest of us all behind to fend for ourselves, instead of trying to sort out the problems we have on earth first to enable us all to lead better lives. And as it turns out when ‘Take Off’ was being composed in 2021 during the billionaire’s space race between Musk, Bezos, and Branson, things would only get worse – and the meaning and story of the record would only become more poignant. Oh, what ‘Absent Future’ that we find ourselves in now in possibly the worst climate of political disarray since the height of the cold war.
“I truly do believe that ‘The World is Dying’, and that there isn’t much we can do about it – even if a ‘Revolution’ were to occur. Humanity is doomed one way or another, due to climate change, selfish actions of oligarchs, or just simply a super-volcano reactivating covering our atmosphere in ash making planet earth uninhabitable. Hmm, maybe I should go back to therapy.”
Grace hopes there is something for everyone on this record, for fans of riffs, synths, slap bass, string quintets, French Horn duets, or drum solos that feel just very slightly too long. It permits a moment of reflection on our lives, how we interact with the world, the planet, society, each other – and makes one question, “are we really in any position as general civilians to make meaningful change to “save it all”.