There is so much about perception that defines art. How we see something can so often be radically different from its initial intention. This is especially true with visual and performance artists who create internally, intentionally, and then present to the critical world. It’s a raw and vulnerable space where inference and implication are easily muddled, or even lost in translation.
Sometimes artists thrive in this dichotomy. In other instances, they cultivate it.
Whim Grace, the talented voice of Fu$ked Up. Broken, Beautiful, and Lies is just such an artist. She inhabits this unique place where her sexy, playful presence intertwines beautifully with a cerebral songwriting talent and a soulful, richly sensual voice that haunts the melody.
Her fans are split, she admits, about who she is and how she presents herself. She wants to be playful, sexy even, and have fun with her beauty as an artist. The challenge, she says honestly, is that “the fans who support me being more silly, more sexy, are not the ones who buy music. And the ones who buy my music, well, they connect with the depth of my songwriting.”
She has yet to be able to figure out this dichotomy. Like TikTok, a platform she has yet to conquer, the algorithm escapes her. Ultimately, this question may be less essential than existential. Her body of work speaks for itself. Her original compositions are deep, thoughtful, and infused with a sublime sense of beautifully colored angst and rosy hope. Watching her perform, both live on a stage and in her videos, you see Whim as a strong and confident performer, evolving and changing, and not waiting for her audience to catch up. She is moving forward and driving her own creativity journey, and inviting the audience to enjoy and be in the present moment with her.
Fucked Up is a sumptuously filmed video. It carries an air of homage to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with Whim cast as vivacious and playful Holly Golightly. She wanted something beautiful and girly, with soft light and warm angles that speak to a sensual moment shared by friends. The cast of characters dance and preen, and ultimately conjoin in an orgiastic food fight followed by a post-prandial repose that conjures up the images of every perfect party. And behind this vivid presentation are the dark and haunting words of a song about a failed relationship, a lying lover, and the anthem that, while she is fucked up and broken, she must show the world that she is beautiful tonight.
Whim will call the piece over-produced. It may be, but the sensuality of the filmmaking etched together with the beauty of Whim’s voice and words makes it call it visually enthralling and captivating.
With Lies there is no inherent dichotomy between the visuals and the song. It is a sexy song. A song about desires and escape, and a youthful exhortation the embrace the now in the face of a chaotic and violent world. The song was written while she was on tour, doing three-hour solo shows in small venues, bars, and tap houses. The song was a product of her needing catch people’s attention in the wake of a shooting in Washington D.C. And while as an artist whim is not politically driven, she is awareness driven. And for her, Lies wasn’t about singing, it was about screaming.
She loves to perform this song because of its juxtaposition with her more cerebral tunes. Lies allows her to “lose her shit” on stage and be primal, banging the tune violently, empathically, against her guitar, extolling the audience to wake the fuck up.
The last year has brought a lot of change for Whim, both as a person and as an artist. She left Portland and moved east, traipsing somewhat nomadically from place to place as she designs and creates her next EP. Her first two songs, Letters from the Future and Sweet Dystopia, will be sonically different. Her voice has changed since leaving Portland, and what she felt was a cold and unsupportive place for her music and art.
As an artist, Whim is influenced by her surroundings. In the rural west, where she is writing and laying down tracks, she is finding a new timbre to her voice. And a renewed sense of support for her art. She has been producing and releasing cover tracks from her home over the last few months. Covering songs from Johnny Cash and others with a soulful and deep voice that perfectly juxtaposes the sensual playfulness of her youth and beauty.
Music is not an easy world. So much is about timing and presence versus straight talent and drive. The music world is filled with the corpses of both uber-talented artists who never made it and the success of those who could play three chords and make a rhyme. Whim Grace has the talent and the drive. Not just ambition. It is more than ambition. It’s will. Stubborn, talented will.
She also has the strength to shine and project her uniqueness, her depth, her darkness, without allowing the market to define her. She will continue to invent and reinvent who she is musically and artistically. She writes her songs and performs her songs herself, with a vibrancy and vocal beauty that ties together Carole King and Sir Chloe in a new harmony, a muse for the post-pandemic age.
