Sometimes confidence arises from the darkest corners. For Sweden’s GRANT, the inspiration for her recent track “Waterline” came from the depths of her own despair, and as she elevated her sense of self, her game rose along with it.
“When I wrote that song I’d been feeling bad for a long time, and I realized I had to make a choice,” says the singer born Alma Caroline Cederlöf and raised just outside Stockholm. “I decided that even though I was probably going to feel bad many more times in my life, I wasn’t going to let it drown me — I was going to choose to live.”
Now she’s back with “Catcher in the Rye”, a song that should elevate her game even higher. It’s been quite a life so far for GRANT, one that started to take its current shape by enrolling in an after-school music program at age 9, leading to studying jazz as a teenager and juxtaposing it with the ’90s alt-rock she grew up with. It’s that whipsmart sense of style and sound that seems to be separating GRANT from the pack.
“I have a family friend who’s a jazz singer and gave me lessons sometimes,” she says. “It opened the door to the most amazing music I’d ever heard, singers like Billie Holiday — their voices and their storytelling went right through me, straight to my heart.” She adds: “When I graduated, I decided I wanted to make music and I wasn’t going to let anyone write my songs for me. But I also felt a little bit lost, and I had to figure out what I really wanted to do as an artist.”
GRANT’s own storytelling is on full display here on “Catcher in the Rye,” and we can’t wait to hear more when she drops her debut album, In Bloom, on June 1. Prepare for liftoff, Stockholm-style.
Featured image by Angelina Bergenwall.