Texas-born country-pop singer Harper Grace returns to London to perform at Europe’s biggest country music festival C2C: Country to Country this March, before releasing seven singles over the rest of the year. This will not be her first visit to London. Harper has been through a lot of trauma as a performer since childhood, but with such a beaming grin as we begin to explore it all began, one wouldn’t know, as it seems that she couldn’t be happier about it. While other singers might want to brush some experiences under the table, it seems that she can’t wait to tell audiences her inspirational tales of making the absolute best from a world that treated her very cruelly.
Harper Grace
In 2023, she joined the Song Suffragettes writer’s round to do just that. “We have these things called “writer’s rounds” in Nashville, and the venue we hold it in is The Listening Room in Nashville. People come in and really just sit down and listen to the lyrics of the songs. Song Suffragettes in particular is actually an all-female round. We are very big in women supporting women, and in the country music industry there is a lot of us, and we’re working our tails off to make an imprint in this town, and Song Suffragettes has been very kind to open up the space for all of us to share our creative passions, and do it in one place”.
A writer’s round so devoted to spread such messages of equality and aspirations could not have been better suited to Harper, as she has quite a story to tell. Harper had first received national exposure when she was just 11 years old, when she performed the American national anthem at an FC Dallas vs. LA Galaxy soccer match, in front of 22,000 people. Faced with numerous technical faults, and feeling the full force the deafening 2010 World Cup vuvuzela trumpet phenomenon, everything that could go wrong, went wrong: “growing up in a family not really familiar with music at all, we didn’t know what questions to ask or really what to do, and me still being so young, I just went with it.” Of the huge crowd in attendance, only three said “good job”.
Harper’s performance received even more attention than she could have imagined, when her performance was broadcast worldwide, as LA Galaxy’s David Beckham was competing in the Olympics at the time. She explains the extent of the inhumane response. “…it was only the next day that we found out that it was televised, and over a million views in 24 hours on YouTube, I was titled “the worst national anthem ever”, and honestly it just spiralled from there. I like to tell people if they could think of the worst thing possible, whether that’s someone saying something to, someone doing something, in the form of bullying, whether that’s cyberbullying, emotional bullying or physical bullying, I could very, very confidently say that I have walked through it, I have experienced it. The first comment that I read on YouTube was “this is why abortion should be legal” and “this is the reason why their ears were bleeding”, and that I should have been “unborn” to save the world from the traumatic experience of listening to what really… well, it was my fault. I was young, and… you know.”
Although Harper very briefly fades out and shrugs as she thinks it back, she still makes clear that she won’t let it stand in her way. While others might have pulled the plug on their own dreams, Harper continued to take a unique route into the public eye, steered heavily by a very faith-based family. Just months after the American anthem disaster, Harper was going on speaking tours to schools to tell her story. “I had a lot of courage and strength in knowing that everything happens for a reason, I think I just walk in that daily, and understand that daily as knowing that, you know, there’s a lot of pieces to a big puzzle, and so knowing that that was just another step in getting to where I am today, I let that situation kind of shape me and encourage me, and realise that it also could be a story to encourage others.”
In giggles, Harper sings an excerpt of her first ever song (a brief ode to shampoo and conditioner), and a jingle about seatbelts written by her mother, makes it no wonder why she partially credits her family, even though they weren’t so interested in music. “My mom, she is so outgoing, I am definitely my mother’s daughter. My dad likes to make the joke that he is watching my mom grow up through me, because we are identical. We’re like twins. She wrote poems a lot, whether that would be in her bible journals and stuff.”
Harper Grace
Since then, Harper has performed on much larger stages, which led to three more very significant people saying “good job” – Lionel Richie, Katy Perry and Luke Bryan, the judges when she appeared on American Idol, aged 16. “I was actually sought out by one of the producers of the show, and I originally said no the first time that she asked me, cause I thought that it was a joke. I read it, and my trauma popped up from being 11-year-old me. I know live television, reality TV and all that. There is no way that I’m going to freely give myself the opportunity to get made fun of yet again. So, I said no about three to four times before I really felt impressed within my spirit and in my heart that it was the right thing to do.
But the only way I felt like going on the show, and knowing that it was the right opportunity was to do original music. I had already been making trips back and forth since I was 14, and at this point I was 16 years old, and I probably had three-hundred songs in my catalogue of songs that I had written from 14 to 16, and so with that I was like… if I’m gonna go, I wanna be the artist I know I can be.” Harper performed her single Yard Sale, made it top the top 50, and was called back to perform again on the season finale as one of the fan favourites. She received a lot of encouragement from the three judges, but one piece of advice from Luke Bryan captured her attention – “You just need to move to Nashville. You’re a really good artist, you have really great lyrics and I believe in you and just think you should follow your career and move to Nashville and just do it.”
And that was exactly what Harper did in 2021, at which point she could confidently say that she was now making music for a living after signing with legendary label Curb Records. “I believe that everything that you walk through can be an encouragement to whomever else is struggling with those same things. So knowing that my record label here and that my team also understands that is still a big part of who I am, it is probably going to be a story that I tell until I’m 60, 70, and not on the earth anymore, you know. So having what was called the Redemption Tour ten years later, I started going back into ball parks and arenas and stadiums, and singing the song that scares me the most!
However, she has continued to publicly reflect upon troubles past with what she called her ‘redemption tour’, culminating in her single Oh, Say, Can You See. It’s traumatic, and I think that’s another piece of the story is just facing the trauma and doing it over and over until it’s no longer my biggest fear, but I’m going in and I’m singing the anthem once again, and I’m kind of redeeming myself in that aspect, but also every city that we hit we’re kind of amplifying the opportunity there, whether it’s going into a foundation or going into these schools, kind of just talking about the journey, and encouraging the students and the adults to know that whatever you go through, nothing’s too big to break through. No crack is gonna define you. To keep powering through and keep pursuing the dreams that are put in your heart, because everyone has a passion, everybody has a purpose, and understanding that just where your journey takes you, to… rather than use the bad things to have you curl up into a ball and be all sad about it, but to use it as ammunition and kind of fuel to your car and fuel to your fire. So that’s been a fun portion of my journey.”
Harper Grace
This is all just one stumble that Harper has made the best of, as she explains how personal some of her upcoming singles will be, and that she wants to make sure that everyone notices. For example, at the top of her social media pages, you will find a teasing, but very in-your-face musical vignette of Harper dancing, waving a baseball bat and telling listeners to “break it like a man”. Don’t panic. It is just the teaser of her first new single Break It Like A Man (out 12th April), and more full videos to come. “I helped direct for Break it Like A Man specifically, and it’s just kind of all these pieces. I think my favourite part about being involved in music, and specifically in country, is the storytelling aspect of it. My brain is just all over the place creative-wise. I wanna put all these different things together and make them tell the best story that it possibly can visually and emotionally and musically. And so, with the threatening with the baseball bat I like, it could be funny, I don’t know if I’m like channelling like a little bit of Taylor Swift, a little bit of Olivia Rodrigo, but just like that you know I think that with songs and with music in general, you can put on those different hats and different characters, that you’re writing about.”
Looking back upon her progress, and now the huge country music canvas ahead, it really is no wonder Harper Grace desires to be at the controls of absolutely everything that she can be in her music career, making her upcoming singles all the more exciting. But what then? Well, considering the lowest mood of the conversation stemmed from her dislike of black pudding on her last London visit, and the fact that she found enough to say about shampoo to write a song about it, one can possibly expect a heartwarming tale of her survival.
Catch Harper Grace at this year’s C2C: Country to Country Festival across the weekend performing sets at The Barrelhouse at Town Square, The Saloon and The Wayside.
Interview of Harper Grace by Nick Pollard in February 2024.
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