In this as-told-to essay, singer and songwriter Grace VanderWaal talks to associate culture director P. Claire Dodson about her new album Child Star, its short film performance piece, and growing up in the public eye after winning America’s Got Talent at 12 years old.
I grew up in Suffern, New York. I used to love my room: blue carpet, four walls, a window. I've been really into vintage collecting since I was eight or nine years old. My mom worked for the church thrift shop, so my room was just a lot of really weird antiques and old dolls and mirrors. I would always isolate into my bedroom. I've always been a hermit in that way, where I need to crawl back into a cave that's my own.
My mom is literally the funniest, most loudest, most just everything woman. You'll hear her laugh watching the TV from three floors up. My dad is really smart, really cultured and into the world and traveling. I feel like that always was something that was passed down to me. He's a really open and curious man.
My sister is too hard working for her own good. The classic “three jobs, can't say no.” Will take on any favor you ask her. Her heart is just too big for her body. My brother is just insane. He's the rebel of the family. He was always getting into shit growing up, and now he's very much like my mom, just funny and cool. If you go downstairs into the kitchen, it's very likely he'll just be blasting rap music and just poking at everyone, trying to get everyone annoyed at him, but in a cute way. He's very much still a childlike spirit, even though he's a grown man now.
I think my sister would say I was an angel as a kid. I was always making up songs, but I never felt like they were songs. I would always just improv and sing to myself, and even “I Don't Know My Name,” I considered it a jingle. I would write little 30-second stupid things. Honestly, I only had written “I Don't Know My Name” when I went on America's Got Talent at age 12.
I'm a very split person, so I can choose not to feel things. But at times it comes through where you can't ignore it anymore, like trying to make relationships with people. I've always felt really alone with my childhood, even as a child. Especially as an adult, now that I'm actually alone, it's felt very unhealed, because I feel like I never had the foundation of comfort that I needed to now be a well-adjusted adult.
In the opening song on the album “Proud,” I write, “Promise I'll be small, I won't take up space at all/Remember gratitude, you tell me I'm great/When I don't cry and I never ask for nothing.”
These types of things seep out with time. Through my writing, it was just naturally spilling out. Then I was just like, f*ck it. I'm already naturally writing about this, so let me just lean into it. I struggle with mental illness and mental health always. A lot of people in my family struggle with mental health, mental illness, so I would be lying if that wasn't definitely a part of it. I felt isolated and was also just a weird kid.
I thought that I was going to get messed up, working on Child Star. Because my whole life, I've avoided thinking about it for so long. I was like, dude, if I have a panic attack and am rocking myself to sleep by thinking about things like this one night every six months, how am I going to delve into these memories and write a whole album? I am going to be so messed up. But I actually felt so much better, and I never thought that would happen.
I think about all those moments that I'm even describing to you now, they're always very secretive. That was a very guilty pleasure of mine, this feeling of being unhappy while good things were happening to me. Guilty is a good word. I felt guilty for feeling bad about those things. There's a liberation from telling a secret.
I have a really bad memory, and I literally don't remember years of my life. But I remember scenes for some reason. There was this waiting room that they would put us in every day for seven hours at a time, and I definitely remember that waiting room, and they just had Cup O' Noodles, and I would sit there and just hang out with my mom and try to pass the time. I remember that waiting room very well. It was a part of the theater, so it was this carpeted floor that probably could be used for storage. A line of fold-out metal chairs, back to back, like musical chair style. It was hard, but it was like, I remember having a lot of fun and feeling cool.
Read more: Grace VanderWaal Doesn't Mind If You Only Know Her As the Winner of AGT
As I was experiencing this early success, this viral fame, I felt like I was in control, but there are a lot of environmental variables that people don't take into account. My mom was with me everywhere I went. If you would've asked me in 2018, "What was the most rebellious thing you did?" I'd be like, "Nothing." People don't take into account that, yeah, you're a kid and people are around you. There is a sense of, you can't really do some things. Not in a way of abuse-y, Hollywood-y vibes. It's more like, you're a kid and my parents are going to read these interviews and watch what I'm doing.
I didn’t have this idea that my whole life was changing at the time. Not even close. I still don't do that. Because I've grown up being under so many life-changing moments, like high pressure, high stress. It's made me a very moment-to-moment person, so I just live in the moment that's happening right now because we can't worry about that right now.
I go through phases hard. I'm probably in a phase right now. We'll see in six months. But I'm a strong believer in phases. I think it's cool that we're capable of being many people, and I am many people. All of my phases still live on throughout me, by the way. I collect the personalities, but they don't go away.
After AGT, I was definitely in my Japanese pop culture phase. I loved cutesy style, Tumblr, Kawaii, Sailor Moon, super preppy vibes. That was definitely the phase that I was in during that era. She was a moment. Then as I was getting older, 16, 17, 18 years old, I went through a pretty hard punk phase related to what I was going through at the time. [Note: in 2020, VanderWaal shaved her head and released a song called “Don’t Assume What You Don’t Know” in 2021.] It's always been hard. There's always been something going on. I swear, I literally cannot catch a break. I always think of those personal things when I think of my phases.
Child Star always felt really visual to me, that’s why there’s a performance piece that I co-directed (with Luca Renzi and Jacob Boehme) and co-choreographed (with Renzi). I was really inspired by contemporary art and dance like that. Something about it was just so honest. It goes into the secret-telling thing. It's just so pure, my secrets laid out.
In the closing song, “Fade,” the lyrics go, "Always been alone, wish I could call my mommy/Wrap me like a doll and just drive me home/Where is everybody/Thought there would be something at the end of the road."
I wrote the song “Fade” after a therapy session where I was like, the hard thing is I don't want to heal. I don't want to forget my sadness or pain because if I do, then it didn't exist at all. Who's going to feel it? That deserves to be remembered. I never knew how to deal with that. I was just like, no one has the answer to that. I am stuck. I'm literally stuck. No one has the answer.
Then I made this album, and I realized, more than pain, I just was dragging this little girl everywhere I went, a little girl that just felt really unheard. It was more than pain. It was locking that door and crying in silence, or feeling overwhelmed and not being able to tell anyone. The idea that I need to be sad because that's the justice that I give to that little girl, I learned it's not that, it's not sadness or isolation. This is the largest act of service or justice I could ever do for her, is to open that door and just let it out. I finally felt good after that.
When I come out at the beginning of the performance video, everyone's holding the mic — I just wanted to be shown as extremely infantilized and weak, and held to a high standard. It's like you're entering this ring of sacrifice.
At the end, I’m experiencing a symbolic death, carried out by dancers. I wrote the story of the play, and I liked the storytelling archetype of the progression of a birth to a death. It symbolized how the public and society in general takes everything girls have and their youth, and then when they don't have anything left to give, they're dead to them and seen as a used product and discarded away.
I think that the best service that I can do for my younger self is just continue to try to make people as mad as possible. If people are getting mad, it's a pretty good sign because it's like, "Why is my product misbehaving? I didn't order it like that." That's satisfying to me. I'm probably just going to continue to try to do that, and continue to talk about things that men don't want to talk about.
