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Eight years after Grace VanderWaal won “America’s Got Talent,” people still see her as the bashful 12-year-old girl from Kansas who floored everyone with her ukulele-playing and contemplative songs.
“I had the weirdest experience recently,” VanderWaal, now 20, tells Variety over Zoom from L.A., the blunt bangs of her tween years replaced by a sleek platinum bob. She recounts how, on a night out with friends, she crossed paths with a woman coming out of the bathroom.
“She was like, ‘You’re a woman! You’re a grown-up!’” VanderWaal says, mimicking the tipsy fan’s shock. “I was like literally gentle-parenting her through this, but she wouldn’t get over it. She couldn’t handle it.”
Lately, VanderWaal has been running into that kind of reaction — fans who can’t stop seeing her as a symbol of the purity and innocence of youth — a lot, even though she’s long since shed the ukulele and her pixie-girl image.
“I’ve been so afraid to shatter that dream for people,” she says. “But like, I want you to ask yourself, why do you feel personally affected? It is really sad, but it’s been very liberating to reclaim that for myself.”
After winning “America’s Got Talent,” VanderWaal released her debut EP, “Perfectly Imperfect,” which became the bestselling EP of 2016. Her first album, 2017’s “Just the Beginning,” built on the folky ukulele-driven sound that captivated America. But in the years since, VanderWaal has been breaking out of that mold, releasing a string of singles that have shown an edgier side, with more complicated production.
Now VanderWaal is gearing up to release her second full-length album, and maybe the first that has felt truly representative of who she is. This year, she signed with Pulse Records, and began pushing the project in a “conceptual” direction — one she teases will take fans by surprise.
“It’s definitely going to upset people and make people really uncomfortable,” she says of the album (whose title and release date are yet to be revealed). “I’m talking about some pretty serious and heavy topics, which isn’t super mainstream sellable.”
She says she pitched the album several places and “scared a lot of grown men” in the process. Pulse was the only label that didn’t back away from her ideas.
“I was saying crazy shit and Pulse is just like, ‘Oh, we love it! Yes!’” she says. “They were genuinely like, ‘Yeah, let’s freak people out together.’”
For the first single, VanderWaal chose a track that would make for “a nice, gentle reintroduction.” “Call It What You Want” — a grunge-tinged guitar-pop number that debuted Aug. 16 — is a little tamer than the rest of the record. “We were like, let’s not throw people over the edge,” she says.
But her latest release, the anthemic ballad “What’s Left of Me,” out now, hints at the album’s darker themes as VanderWaal chews over a life-changing breakup.
“I really wanted to depict this very specific feeling of, not even sadness, but this disgust of this person,” she says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, you changed me and you made the woman that I am, but you don’t deserve that.’”
Lately, art has also imitated life on-screen. After leading Disney’s 2020 “Stargirl” teen movie and its sequel, VanderWaal does a 180 by playing Vesta Sweetwater — a virginal pop star who gets snagged in a deep-fake sex scandal — in Francis Ford Coppola’s forthcoming “Megalopolis.” As Vesta, VanderWaal performs a wholesome original song during a key scene before it all comes crashing down — causing her to initiate a career rebrand.
Coppola had been tracking VanderWaal’s career for years, and when “Megalopolis” finally got off the ground, he looked her up. At their meeting, he told VanderWaal about the project and her character, whom she “definitely connected” to. He offered her the job — which included writing two songs for the film — on the spot.
“It was just so collaborative, and I was shocked,” she says of working with the director. “You’d think Francis Ford Coppola, at his stature — I would never, ever anticipate the experience that I had. He truly just wanted to follow the art and what was best for the movie.”
So much so that VanderWaal had a significant hand in shaping her character, “almost to the point where I was like, ‘I need to not abuse this power,’” she says.
“I obviously had some personal investment in her, but I also saw her more of like a caricature of the trope that I also participated in,” VanderWaal adds.
Although she came away from “Megalopolis” with “lots of good and crazy memories,” VanderWaal is keeping music her main focus.
“I don’t think I would ever do anything just for a check or to be on-screen,” she says. “Honey, I spent my whole childhood on-screen.”
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