A few years ago with introduced you to a singer-songwriter that we really believed in, Harper Grace. We recently reconnected with the songstress, as she embarks on a brand new era in her music. Continue reading to learn more about her story.

A Dallas, Texas native, Grace grew up with an incredibly supportive family. “I grew up in Texas, and my dad always had country music blaring in his truck, and my Nana played the accordion. She would listen to records like Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, and Johnny Cash. The list goes on and on.”

Grace recalls finding so much solace in music from an early age. “My found love for country started at a very early age. My Nana bought me my very first guitar when I was six or seven, and we had a piano donated to my family around the same time, so I was homeschooled and I just fell in love with writing songs.” She started to spend her days writing songs and listening to some of her favorite artists.

“I started really, really diving into music and what it meant to be, and fast forward a little bit, I was known as the worst national anthem singer ever as an eleven year old, which was a very trailing time for me, but also taught me a lot about having confidence and bravery, and learning who I was to the core and what my purpose was and what I wanted to say and that mattered,” she shared, adding, ” “I grew up singing gospel music, so Nicole C. Mullen was somebody I listened to a lot. My mom listened Norah Jones and Christina Aguilera and Alicia Keys and Aretha Franklin, but I heard Rascal Flatts, and they were this beautiful mix of the soul and the country music that I would listen to with my grandma, so it was a wide variety of music that inspired me, and I knew I wanted to be part of the country music family because I could close my eyes and see what they were saying within their lyrics, and I wanted to be able to do that and incorporate the soul that I loved so much too.”

The Turning Point:

Grace knew that country music was her calling in life, even when she was a young child. “Music was what stuck and what I have been attached at the hip to. […] It’s what feels right and resonates with the chords of my heart,” she shared.

At sixteen, the singer went on American Idol, and then found herself at a crossroads, finally moving to Music City. “I moved to Nashville, when I was roughly nineteen, and I’ve been here ever since. Signed a record deal shortly after I moved here, and I’ve been striving to tell stories and ripping pages right of my heart even if it bleeds some times, and hoping people hold on to them.”

Since moving to Nashville, the songstress focused on finding her sound and her team. “It’s definitely been a journey. You go through this phase of figuring out what your style is and who you want to work with. […] With some of my past releases, they’ve been very fun and catchy songs, but I reached a point where I want to be so vulnerable and so honest, and I don’t want to hold back. It’s what I fell in love with in the beginning, which is the organic side of country music. […] I have moved towards just this more vocal-forward, organic sound, that I hope to kind of continue to walk into, where you can just feel like you’re right there in the middle of an 8-track recording in the middle of the live session.”

Today:

Flash forward to today, Grace is embarking on a brand new era in her music, a more vulnerable and deeply personal one. “I gained a lot of confidence in wanting to release “if daddy says no” due to the fans. I’ve been singing it live for a little over a year now, and hearing people’s stories and having them come to a point of vulnerability with me, with the song, is what gave me confidence.”

Grace’s single, “if daddy says no” officially comes out on February 27th, and it’s truly one of the best songs she’s ever released.

“This is the most personal song that I’ve ever let out in the world. It’s my baby for sure. It tells a story of a situation that I was kinda stuck in. The tension between doing what was right for me at the time and figuring out what that was. I love love, I’ve always been an hopeless romantic, and I’ve also been the girl that sees the best in everything even when it’s waving a red flag in front of my face,” she shared, adding, “It’s the tension between the two relationships that mean a lot to me. Luckily, my dad did say no, and this is a true story, and I closed the door on something that should have been closed a long time prior to that. […] I believe a lot of time that some of these songs that maybe I’ll get a chance to release down the road that we have plans for, it’s always been a time that I’ve learned something and I’ve been able to attach it to a couple chords and paint a canvas picture with it. It’s very much ripped right out of my heart and put to some music.”

For Grace, this is only just the beginning of her career as a country music artist. She has true staying power, as her talent in songwriting and singing can match up to any artist in the industry right now. Fans should keep their eyes and ears open for more music coming from Grace sooner rather than later!

“I’m grateful for the country music listeners because that’s what really pushed me to step into the true Harper Grace, the intimate, the real, the crispy vocal that comes out, there’s just so much emotion and so much rawness in this song and what’s to come as well,” shared the singer. “We have a lot of stuff that is coming soon, tour dates, new music tease, lots to come.”

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Today we shine our spotlight on a singer-songwriter that we have been loving lately, Harper Grace. Grace is a singer-songwriter who creates music that comes from the heart, all while drawing on her multitude of inspirations growing up. Continue reading to learn more about her story.

A Dallas, Texas native, Grace grew up with an incredibly supportive family. “My mom always tells this story that she would pray even before we were born that we would know what we wanted to do at a very young age, so that we’d have the time to work on that craft,” she shared.

At first, Grace and her family thought that gymnastics was going to be her thing. “I was actually in gymnastics first, when I was six years old, I was training for the olympics hopeful group, and my mom was an elite gymnast. I was bound to follow in her footsteps, but shortly after being in gymnastics for so long, I finally told her I wanted to quit and do music.”

Although nobody in her family was musically-inclined, her parents supported her desire to play music. “We got a piano donated to my family after a year of praying for one,” she began. “After that, I just fell head first into music, and I was homeschooled, so I wrote songs about shampoo, conditioner, and home schooling. And my grandma got me my first guitar at the age of seven. That’s when I really started listening to Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash and really trying to implement country more into the songs that I was writing as a kid.”

When she started hearing artists like Parton on her grandmother’s radio, something in her just clicked. “As a kid I could close my eyes and feel what she was feeling when she would sing and I could picture it all in my head. The whole realm of music to me painted pictures in my head and that’s fascinated me a lot, so knowing they were capable of putting that to music and putting stories in just a few lines in a 3 minute song was something that was really, really exciting to me.”

The Turning Point:

While singing gospel music at her church and studying incredible singers across genres, like Joss Stone, Norah Jones, and Taylor Swift, Grace quickly took interest in the storytelling side in songwriting. “I fell really in love with the songwriting process and what it did for me, listening to [singers] on the radio,” she shared.

She also shared that things really started to click for her when she heard Rascal Flatts for the first time on the radio. “They incorporated soul and country together and that was my hope in knowing that I could also do that one day.”

Despite being young, when she discovered her calling, Grace worked extremely hard to make her dream a reality. “I had a lot of drive and ambition as a kid, I saw what I wanted, and I chased it as fast as I could,” she shared. Adding, “I always knew that what I wanted to do was music, so I looked up wikipedia pages at the age of 13 and 14 of my favorite songs and who the writer’s were, and from that I just researched contacts and instagrams and emails and all the ways that I could contact some of my favorite people. […] I started doing that with my dream-list of writers, who I really hoped to collaborate with one day.”

Her incredible work-ethic and networking ability led her to eventually connect with the ‘right’ people, ultimately leading her to her deal with Curb Records at just 21 years old. “I had a dream so big and continued to update what the dream was. […] I put all the drive and passion into making it happen,” she shared. “If I’m going to dream it, I am going to do whatever is possible to make that dream come true.”

Today:

Most recently, Grace has released two new songs, including “Sparkle” and “Oh Say Can You See.” While the former is a song that speaks to Grace’s gritty, yet sparkly roots, “Oh Say Can You See” is a letter to her younger self to remember her worth no matter what. The songstress recalls going through bullying at a young age, and this song is a song that reflects what she would have told herself back then.

When asked about the writing process for the track, Grace shared, “The song was obviously a title on my song ideas for many years, probably ten years. […] It’s such a big story. […] I use my writing sessions as therapy.” She added later, “That was the fastest song that I have ever written out of the 490 songs I have written over the years and it was a really beautiful to process the story and getting to tell it.”

For Grace, this is only just the beginning of her career as a country music artist. She has true staying power, as her talent in songwriting and singing can match up to any artist in the industry right now. Fans should keep their eyes and ears open for more music coming from Grace sooner rather than later!

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