We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Grace Power. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Grace below.
Grace, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?
I think to some degree, I’ve known all my life. I remember in elementary school, we had to draw a picture of the profession we wanted when we grew up. I drew a singer on stage, probably modeled after Hannah Montana, and wrote “pop star”. But before I turned it in, I crossed it out and changed it. Most likely to “teacher”. It’s crazy looking back and realizing that even as a kid, it felt like too big of a dream to dream.
The fears didn’t go away quickly, but by the time I was in high school, the feeling that music was what I was supposed to do became so much bigger than the fear.
Grace, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Yes! I’d consider myself a multi-hyphenate artist, songwriter, and actor. As an artist, my goal is to make music that accompanies people during their biggest emotions. For their falling in love, dancing during a full moon moments. But also for their difficult days. Their heartbreak, their anxiety, their grief. I want to create a safe space that says, “You won’t be here forever. But I’ll sit with you while you’re here now.” My writing has a lot of witchy, Americana, and folk influences, which makes for a really fun combination coming from an Asian American girl from Fresno, California.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
I once got really great advice from a friend of mine in the music industry. He said that my music was great, but my social media didn’t make me look 100% committed and that was hurting my potential. I never dreamed of being an influencer, so social media didn’t come naturally to me. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to strengthen my social media presence in a way that felt sustainable.
One piece of advice is finding where social media can intersect with your creative interests. For me, I love visuals, so I invested more time in planning out photoshoots where I could get a ton of photos and vertical videos to share on social media. For some people, they love playing live every week. That can easily transfer into a bunch of social media content.
Another piece of advice is to really nail down the top 3-5 things you want people to know about you, and make sure you have that fully incorporated into your content. Just like you were building the branding for a company.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I waited a long time to start releasing music. In my head, I justified it by saying I wanted to improve on a bunch of things first so that my music could be the best it could be. I wanted to take more voice lessons, take songwriting workshops, get better at piano, learn the basics of production, the list went on and on. But I had to learn that my perfectionism wasn’t helping me create a better final version. It was preventing me from making anything at all. And when I did jump in, I ended up learning way faster than I would’ve if I had just waited. Sometimes you have to just co-exist with those fears of embarrassment and failure and say, “I hear you, but I have to do this anyway.”
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gracepowermusic/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaPCoQ3ShsTmYXvTHik3ZSg
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@gracepowermusic
Image Credits
Erin Wolfe