Amazing Grace

Grace Carter’s songs about her troubled relationship with her father have helped her get over her heartbreak, she tells David Smyth

ONE day I will be at the Brits… I don’t know when but it will happen.” That’s a tweet Grace Carter posted in February 2015, aged 17. Four years later, there she was, posing on the red carpet in a floorlength coat. It may take another year for her to get a nomination, but if the soulful Londoner maintains the quality of her early run of singles, it’s inevitable.

She started memorably in mid-2017, supporting Dua Lipa (with whom she shares management) on her European tour after releasing only one song. The video for the track, called Silence, saw her singing directly at the camera in close-up, crying real tears. Her vaulting, spectacular voice, coupled with lyrics such as, “I believe every word you didn’t say/Now I see you’re only gonna break me down”, might initially make you think: here we go, another woman who’s been dumped, like Adele on 21 orAmy Winehouse on Back to Black. But it’s more serious than that. “When we were shooting, the director said: ‘ Look at the camera like it’s him.’ I literally just burst into tears,” she tells me. “We didn’t have to use it, but when it came to the edit I thought, ‘You know what, that is me in my purest, most natural state.’ It is hard — I’m not gonna lie — but it’s all I’ve ever done.”

She’s singing about her father, who she doesn’t remember ever living with her and her mother, and who dropped in and out of her life every few years for visits. She last saw him when she was 16.

Another single, the heart-wrenching piano ballad Why Her Not Me, is about him starting a new family. The video ends with her staring into his home at night, alone on the outside. Sitting in a pub n e a r h e r Q u e e n’s Pa rk home, she’s far more upbeat and unbroken than her fragile music suggests, and clearly ready for our conversation to home in on this subject. I planned to edge tactfully towards it after talking about nicer things — her recent third place in the BBC Sound of 2019 poll, her support tourswith Rag‘N’Bone Man, Haim and Mabel, or performing at Wembley Arena with Ellie Goulding before Christmas — but she brings it up first.

“My dad broke my heart before any boy had a chance to,” she says. “I felt

that pain but didn’t understand it