Thirteen year old musical genius
June 7, 2017 3:02 PM Subscribe
There is a reason something gets 60,000,000 views on Youtube 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. She carried a ukulele. It was a generational moment.
She admitted to the hosts that most of her friends didn't even know she sang, which suggests that she had never performed publicly before that night. 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. I have a friend with a couple of Grammys for his songwriting, another whose songs have been covered by Ringo Starr, Dave Mason and Mellencamp among others. They were not this good at this age. This little girl, now all of 13 years old, is already their equal, and possessed of a haunting voice that carries as much emotion as Janis Joplin's, but without the chemical burden.
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.
One other thing. After two more appearances, she took home the million dollars for winning the season of America's Got Talent. Not a bad start for her musical career.
She admitted to the hosts that most of her friends didn't even know she sang, which suggests that she had never performed publicly before that night. 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. I have a friend with a couple of Grammys for his songwriting, another whose songs have been covered by Ringo Starr, Dave Mason and Mellencamp among others. They were not this good at this age. This little girl, now all of 13 years old, is already their equal, and possessed of a haunting voice that carries as much emotion as Janis Joplin's, but without the chemical burden.
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.
One other thing. After two more appearances, she took home the million dollars for winning the season of America's Got Talent. Not a bad start for her musical career.
This post was deleted for the following reason: Hey, this sort of bloggy first-person structure is not how posts are done here, sorry. -- restless_nomad
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