Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Grace Merrill. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Grace, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
The biggest risk I have ever taken – by far – was moving from Nashville, Tennessee back to my hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma in May of last year. There were several reasons that I ended up making this drastic life change for myself (personal, financial, and professional/business reasons), but ultimately, I felt my creative spark had died. I know that sounds absurd, especially since I was living in Music City, but it’s true! In the seven years I spent in Nashville, I transformed from this innocent, starry-eyed child excited to embark on a new journey in an unfamiliar city, to a burnt-out twenty-something living paycheck-to-paycheck and feeling absolutely no desire to even approach an instrument outside of work. Art – music, specifically – has been an integral part of my life for as long as I can remember, and the second I realized that it no longer played a significant role in my everyday life, I knew that I had to make a change. So, I decided to completely alter the life I had built for myself: I quit my jobs, I said goodbye to my friends, I packed up all my stuff, and I moved home in the hopes of re-igniting that creative spark. It was quite the gamble, but it ended up paying off. It’s been almost a full year now (how has time flown by so fast?!) and I’ve been busy working on music in so many different ways! I’m teaching voice and piano lessons, I’m a worship leader at a local church, and I spend a lot of my free time either recording cover songs to practice my vocals or writing (and recording original material) with a buddy of mine. Don’t get me wrong, there is not a day that goes by where I don’t miss Nashville in some way, but I’m glad I took that huge risk and moved. I think I ultimately made the best decision for myself and my creativity.
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?
Man, these “tell us about yourself” questions are always so hard for me to answer, but I’ll do my best.
I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and sometime pretty early on in my childhood, I discovered my adoration for music. According to my parents, I’ve always had a really good ear and a fascination to learn music in some way, shape, or form. I started piano lessons at 6 years old, and ultimately graduated to voice lessons and guitar lessons in my teenage years. When I reached high school, I became very heavily involved in the choir, show choir, and drama programs my high school offered, and I even began songwriting in what little spare time I had. I got accepted into Belmont University my senior year and chose to major in their Commercial Music program. I got my undergraduate degree in Commercial Music in April of 2021, and I have been a music teacher and a working musician ever since.
As far as teaching music goes, I’d like to think that my malleable curriculum and my unorthodox training techniques are what sets me apart the most from my peers. I always teach my students from personal experience and I form-fit a curriculum around each individual student, their skill level, and their needs, as not every person learns the same way. As a musician and an performer, my job is to entertain others, and I always make sure that I’m entertaining my audience to the best of my ability and engaging with them when I’m performing. It’s so easy to create a barrier between the audience and the band at a show, and I am constantly trying to break down that barrier whenever I’m on stage. And when it comes to writing songs, my main objective nowadays is to healthily process personal experiences through writing about them and hoping that someone can relate to whatever it is that I’m trying to say. Though I am still constantly learning and honing my craft, I’m quite proud of how far I’ve come, and I’m excited to see where music leads me creatively.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
This is a tough question to answer because there are so many ways that you can support artists and creatives nowadays. Social media is a wonderful platform that allows us to follow some of our favorite creatives or like or share their content, which allows for those creatives to reach people they might not have otherwise been able to reach. Personally, I’m not very present on social media (I’m lucky if I post maybe half a dozen times a year), so one of my favorite ways to support artists nowadays is to either attend their shows or concerts or buy a piece of their merchandise or art. There was a music business class I was required to take in college, and one of the major takeaways I got from that class was the way artists made their money nowadays, and the two primary sources of an artist’s income were their merch and their concert tickets. So, if there’s a band or an artist that I love, I tend to support them by figuring out a way to see one of their shows while they’re on tour, or I buy a piece of their merch; sometimes I’ll buy their merch at one of their shows.
How someone can go about creating a thriving ecosystem for creative people is a much more difficult question to answer. I think I’m still trying to figure that one out for myself, honestly. For me, I think I immersed myself in an overly-creative environment for so long that I suffocated myself with it, and only when I took a step back and allowed myself some metaphorical “room to breathe” did I feel like my creative self again. So, for me, creating a thriving creative ecosystem is all about finding balance. That can mean a lot of different things for a lot of different people; for me, it meant changing my environment from one filled exclusively with other creatives to one that was filled with both creatives and non-creatives alike, and the creatives in my environment now are ones that have a lot of similar musical tastes as I do, so it’s easier for me to form new musical ideas because I can bounce those ideas off of those similar-minded creatives if I needed or so desired.
Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?
The main resource that I wish I had known about sooner was a website called WikiRhymer. My biggest struggle as a lyricist is finding just the right word or set of words to pair a stanza with, and WikiRhymer makes that so much easier. I had a songwriting professor introduce me to that website when I was in college and I’ve been using it ever since. That website, and a thesaurus. Those are two tools I should have utilized from the jump and I wish I had known about them (or, in the case of the thesaurus, thought to use them) sooner.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.gracemerrillmusic.com
- Instagram: @grace.merrill
- Other: Some of the pictures I have listed are a little dated, as the last time I performed was August of last year (2024). The pictures I provided are from different performances or jam sessions from the past several years.
Image Credits
The photos in this collection were either taken by my mother (Gina Merrill), by a friend of mine from high school (Stuart Nelson), or by myself.