Interview with NPR
Grace discussed her new album 'Childstar' and growing up in the public eye with NPR’s Scott Simon, and she posted a video of her singing "You're So Beautiful" slightly tongue in cheek, playing the guitar from rehearsals at Lincoln Hall, Chicago (the first venue on the tour, link in performance page). That would be the first time she had ever played the guitar at a concert. (She has played it before at events with a small audience, but never at concerts.) Grace also posted a video on TikTok of her signing merch for the tour, with the captions "My manager getting me to sign a million of these" and "Need the motivation".
NPR Interview (slightly edited for clarity)
“Gratitude and being humble were really confusing as a child, because I felt so much guilt and burden, I felt like these amazing things had happened, but at the same time, terrible things were happening in my personal life, terrible. I felt it was my duty to be grateful and not to feel any of the bad things that were going wrong. It was a really strange feeling. I think it's something a lot of women experience, even as adults, to stay pleasant and smile, and fight your natural instincts. You want to tell people around you – I need help, I need to survive, and it’s very unnatural to swallow that down, and smile, and say – I’m really happy to be here.
Making this album made me realize that I have carried this with me for quite some time, these feelings, and this story, and my strongest battle was to deal with it, I felt like it was this rock in me that I carried absolutely everywhere, in bad times, happy times, it was always there. I wrote this album, and it really made me realize that the root of that wound was the secrecy of it, that fact that I never spoke about, and I never told anyone. Writing it out gave me freedom, and made me realize, oh my gosh, that was such a huge part of it, and I didn’t even know.
A lot of people with interrupted childhoods had to take on a more adult role. I think that you can feel this unfinished business; a lot of people can carry that child trapped in purgatory with them. And to be able to do this music, and make it right, that has been a send-off for me, that little girl deserves her story to be told right.