2. One of them is really smart, but the others sniffed too much glue back in high school

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1 THE VANDERVAULT TIMES: DAILY EDITORIAL 1 P a g e Thursday, April 12th, 2018 The Artist Currently Known as Grace or Possibly Mary Sue By Chris Latham For any of our readers who have been following Grace s career for anything more than a month or two, you have probably read something somewhere that purports to provide an in-depth analysis of the lyrics of one or more of her songs. Indeed, one of the stated goals here at VanderVault Times is to provide our loyal readers with just such an analysis, delivered to you each Sunday morning until such time (if ever) that the entirety of Grace s catalog has been so analyzed. Yet if you ve read many of these analyses, specifically analyses of the same song by different experts, then you probably came away from the experience with one of the following three notions: 1. These experts don t know what they re talking about, because their understanding of her lyrics don t match my own 2. One of them is really smart, but the others sniffed too much glue back in high school 3. Grace s lyrics are intentionally written to leave them open to interpretation

2 THE VANDERVAULT TIMES: DAILY EDITORIAL 2 P a g e The first two options are in jest, of course, since it has been obvious almost from the start that Grace is a master lyricist who employs symbolic language with an ease that not only belies her age, but is both astounding and confounding at the same time. Seldom with her lyrics are meanings as simple as they seem on the surface, thus Open the window, choose your favorite vinyl may not really be about letting fresh air into the living room while picking a well-played LP from the collection to plop onto the record player. Then again it may mean exactly that. Take her song, Just a Crush. On the surface, this seems simply enough a song about breaking off with a suitor who s trying to take a relationship to the extreme end, sending him into the friend-zone while at the same time giving a master class to would-be song writers on how break-up songs ought to be written. But because the language she uses has certain ambiguities (for instance, you and you re are never directly identified with a he, so the pronoun could actually be representative of a non-person, and even the word marriage can be understood figuratively in a non-matrimonial sense), the song can have a more subtle underlying meaning. It was suggested by someone (I don t remember who) soon after she performed it for the first time at BeanRunner Cafe that the

3 THE VANDERVAULT TIMES: DAILY EDITORIAL 3 P a g e song was really about the difficult decision Grace was in the process of making: did she really want a singing career (the career being the you, and thus having a marriage to it), or was it just a passing fancy for her (a momentary crush). It was an interesting interpretation, specifically because Grace had no experience with even dating a boy, let alone having him beg her to accept a marriage proposal. However, deciding her long term career (at the ripe old age of 13) was at that time weighing heavily on her thoughts. That this second meaning is even plausible in a song that at first glance seems so certain to be a typical break-up song is quite impressive. It s even more impressive if Grace never intended it to be taken that way, since it would speak to powerful underlying mental processes working through her subconscious mind, leading her to use language which left the interpretation open. Another thing you may have noticed if you ve read through Grace s lyrics is just the sheer volume of metaphor she employes. Certainly there have been a number of YouTube comments to the effect, Metaphor is Grace s second language. A prime example of the rapidity with which she can spin out metaphor is her How to write a song video from January of 17. In it she explains that to write a song, you choose something really random (a subject), make it deep (her way of

4 THE VANDERVAULT TIMES: DAILY EDITORIAL 4 P a g e saying to hide meaning within symbolic language), and relate to you (use personal experience). She gave three examples, none particularly good lyrics, but in all three she spun the subject directly into some form of symbolism. The first was about her dog Frankie s collar: Shiny and silver that s what I see, everybody ignores the fact, that the world loves you so So where was the collar in that? Was a dog even mentioned? It became shiny and silver in an instant, which could be a dog tag (if you knew the song was about a collar), or could just as well have been about a wedding ring (a song about marriage), a silver coin (maybe a song about chasing after wealth, instead of what s really important), or a song about seeing the silver lining on a bright, bright sunshiny day. The second song was about a gas cooktop. As she lit a burner, she sang: You light the fire in my heart Just you and me tonight You light the fire in my heart This time the subject was spun nearly out of existence. Was it a stovetop, or a person? If stovetop, was having a fire lit in her heart about looking forward to cooking dinner tonight and having a full belly? Or maybe heartburn? If person, was it a potential love song? But that s the beauty of such language, it means what you want it to mean.

5 THE VANDERVAULT TIMES: DAILY EDITORIAL 5 P a g e Or what of her third song, about a purple flyswatter: Purple, purple webs Purple, purply webs They stop you So here, does webs mean the webbing of the flyswatter? Because it really was purple, after all. Or is it a veiled reference to spider webs? In fact, the flyswatter s webbing had the general shape of a spider web. And she didn t sing they crush you or they stomp you, which is what a flyswatter does to flies. But spider webs, they stop flies mid flight, catching them in their sticky threads. As I said, these weren t particularly great, being just small snippets of songs about silly subjects. But still, it does demonstrate just how quickly she can transform a subject into metaphor or other forms of symbolism, which then leads to artistic interpretation. To further the idea of interpretation, let me take a detour here. Recently I enjoyed listening to a lecture about the merits of artistic expression in Disney animations, and the lecturer veered into discussing the works of the novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky. The central theme of this digression was the idea that Dostoevsky himself didn t necessarily know where the story would go as he wrote it; i.e. how his characters would respond to the situations in which he placed them at least, not until their individual character traits where fully fleshed out and

6 THE VANDERVAULT TIMES: DAILY EDITORIAL 6 P a g e considered. Since the work wasn t begun with a mind towards its end result, it was the character development itself that led the narrative forward. Because of this, the work wouldn t end up being propagandistic in nature, as Dostoevsky would be unlikely to inject the novel with his own particular opinion on matters, since the characters themselves would have a worldview that guided their decisions a world-view which grew from their own development. World-views aside, the lecturer used this idea of an unguided outcome to support a view of what constitutes good art. For art to be considered good, then at least using this lecturer s definition it should be crafted in such a way that its interpretation is left open to the viewer, reader, listener, or any other way in which art is enjoyed. Thus, art shouldn t preach or attempt to persuade, otherwise it really is just propaganda. As I listened to this lecture, I immediately thought of Grace s art. Her lyrics are never preachy. There s no propaganda to be found. And yet at least one of her songs Hope for Change can be interpreted, if one is so inclined, to support a cause-dujour; i.e. to be taken politically. But it can just as well be interpreted to mean, I put off paying the electric bill and they shut the power off. To keep warm I had to light a fire in the wood stove, but the stupid match burned my finger. Ouch! Okay, so that s a stretch, but you get the idea.

7 THE VANDERVAULT TIMES: DAILY EDITORIAL 7 P a g e Further supporting this notion that her music is true art are statements made by Grace herself, who on numerous occasions has mentioned that she doesn t begin with a particular direction for a song, since in her own experience music written with a destination in mind has always turned out bad. She s even said that often, the direction a song took as she began putting words to paper completely changed as the songwriting progressed, and that if she didn t allow it to follow its own lead it would all go wrong. Personally, I m just floored by such statements, some made when she was only 12. And if this isn t the very definition of a true artist, then what is? Fine, you might be saying, I agree with you on that. But what does being a true artist have to do with the name Mary Sue? Before I answer, if you re not familiar with the term, take a moment to go read the Mary Sue entry of Wikipedia (see ). I ll pause while you do... All done? Great! So what do you call a child (insert young adult here if you prefer), who with virtually no training, little practice, little knowledge, little actual experience, and is a self professed procrastinator to boot, is yet able to out-perform seasoned professionals in multiple different areas of skill? That s right, a Mary Sue. You see, Grace VanderWaal would

8 THE VANDERVAULT TIMES: DAILY EDITORIAL 8 P a g e make an unrealistic fictional character, one who would be rightfully panned by critics if she were written into a novel. She s an actualized apparition of an archetype of idyllic fantasy that can t possibly exist for real. Yet she does. Grace VanderWaal is a Mary Sue.