Perception defines art. How we see something can so often be radically different from the artist’s initial intention.
This holds true especially with visual and performance artists who create internally, intentionally, and then present and perform to a critical material world. It’s a raw and vulnerable space where inference and implication are easily misunderstood, misinterpreted, or even lost in translation.
Some artists thrive in this dichotomy.
Others cultivate it.
Whim Grace, the talented singer and subject of the song and music video F%&$ed Up, Broken, Beautiful and Lies, is just such an artist. She inhabits a unique place of a genuine, sexy, and playful presence that intertwines with her cerebral songwriting talent and a soulful, rich, and sensual voice that haunts the melody.
Her fans are split, she acknowledges, about who she is and how she presents herself. She wants to be playful, sexy even, and have fun with her beauty as an artist. “The challenge,” she says honestly, is “the fans who support me being more silly… are not ‘Necessarily’ the ones who buy the music. And the ones who buy the music ‘Tend’ to connect with the depth of my songwriting.”
She has yet to be able to figure out this dichotomy. Like TikTok, a platform she has yet to conquer, algorithms escape her. Ultimately, this question may be less critical than existential. Her original compositions are deep, thoughtful, and infused with a sublime sense of beautifully juxtaposed angst and rosy hope. Watching her perform, both live on a stage and in her videos, you see Whim as a strong and confident performer, evolving and changing, not waiting for her audience to catch up.
She drives her own creative journey, and invites the audience to enjoy and be in the present moment with her.
But also catch up.
Because Whim Grace doesn’t sit still and her talent isn’t attached to a single moment. It is flowing forward from its inception from a chanteuse doing in fiding her own character over covers of song like Amazing Grace, with a poignant vibrancy of lost innocence, to writing, composing, and producing her own songs that seem to explode from her head in a controlled, but primal rage.
And the songs? They evolve as well.
F%&$ed Up is a sumptuously filmed video. It carries an air of homage to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with Whim cast as a 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 looking at the dark parts of yourself and loving them. “That they, too, can be beautiful too.” Says the singer. “That broken is beautiful. That realizing that is where healing, acceptance, and forgiveness begin. The song is a beautiful anthem that what is fucked up and broken, is beautiful tonight–and every night.
Whim calls the piece over-produced. It may be, but the sensuality of the filmmaking etched together with the beauty of Whim’s voice, and words make it visually enthralling and captivating particularly as we see the artist wander industrial areas of Portland with a bouquet of white balloons at twilight, a contrast of harsh and beautiful, dirty and virginal.
With Lies, there is no inherent dichotomy between the visuals and the song. It is a sexy song about desires and escape, and a youthful exhortation. to 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 need to 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 in juxtaposition to her more cerebral tunes. Lies allows her to “lose her shit” on stage while she loses her clothing with potent intention in the video and be primal, banging the tune violently, empathically, against her guitar, admonishing the audience to wake the fuck up.
The last year has brought 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 My Dear Sweet Dystopia, will be sonically different. “Portland is a great town for some. For me, it was toxic,” Whim says. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to grow and evolve in that environment, so I left. I moved to the Mid-West, to find nature again.” She needed to find a place to find peace, and to be nurtured.
As an artist, Whim is influenced by her surroundings. In the rural west, where she is now writing and laying down tracks, she finds 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 offsets 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 industry 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 a highly commercial 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 vibrancy and vocal beauty that ties together Joni Mitchell and Sir Chloe into a new harmony, a muse for the post-pandemic age.
Her next EP is My Dear Sweet Dystopia, which features “Light Leaks”, “Barbed Wire”, and “Heart Break”
You can follow Whim Grace on
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