VanderWaal off to great start with ‘ The Beginning’
2016 America’s Got Talent winner illuminates what’s to come with first full- length album.
Simon Cowell famously pegged Grace VanderWaal as “the next Taylor Swift” during her season- winning run on America’s Got Talent in 2016. With her first full- length album, she’s looking to make that comparison stick.
In the year since she won Season 11 of the reality competition, the 13year- old has more than successfully avoided the burnout that has sunk the careers of other performance-show victors.
In the past few months alone, VanderWaal has signed to IMG Models, become the face of Fender guitars, and appeared on red carpets and awards shows with her freshfaced friends including Millie Bobby Brown and Maddie Ziegler.
But VanderWaal was always a musician first, and her full- length release is the appropriately titled
Just the Beginning ( out Friday). Flashes of vintage Swift shine through the album’s 12 tracks, which has much grander musical ambitions than VanderWaal’s uke- strumming may have initially shown. Over the course of Just the Begin
ning, the young singer proves she can channel pop stars twice her age.
Burned recalls Swift’s high- drama orchestrations. Insane Sometimes is a dead ringer for a Halsey track, down to its troubled subject matter. VanderWaal’s big- throated performance on A Better Life channels Florence Welch and Miley Cyrus. And the vaguely tropical- house production of
Florets is seemingly crafted for pop radio.
There’s a certain chirp in VanderWaal’s voice that’s reminiscent of Swift, but otherwise, her vocals align much more closely to Sia’s in her fullvoiced belting and nonchalant pronunciations, particularly on her stomping performance on the feisty
So Much More Than This. In VanderWaal’s musical language, vowels get twisted and mashed together like Play- Doh, and consonants are treated as just a suggestion.
But while so many pop stars seem to bypass their tweenage phases, VanderWaal sounds like a 13- year- old, in the best possible way.
In a voice that sounds refreshingly green, she launches herself at huge choruses with a total lack of restraint, and it’s lovely to hear.