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 13-yearold 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 fresh-faced 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 Be
ginning (out Friday). Flashes of vintage Swift shine through the album’s 12 tracks, which has much grander musical ambitions than VanderWaal’s ukestrumming may have initially shown.
Over the course of Just the Beginning, the singer proves she can channel pop stars twice her age. Burned recalls Swift’s high-drama orchestrations. In
sane 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 full-voiced 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.
Beyond the album’s sleek pop production, there’s still plenty of VanderWaal’s trademark ukulele strums to please her original fans, heard on the album’s single Moonlight as well as highlights Just a Crush and Escape My Mind.
But it’s A Better Life, the song that so masterfully channels several of pop’s biggest voices, that best combines her two modes, opening with her modest fingerpicking before she unleashes one of the album’s most exquisitely sung melodies.