Grace London Feature Edited

Junior Grace Schmidhauser is working hard as the year draws to a close. Finals are approaching, she just was inducted into the National Honors Society, and she’s working on her upcoming album. Wait, an album? Yes, an album (her third, in fact) because Grace isn’t just your typical McCallum student. She’s also a local musician that goes by the name “Grace London.”

It all started with The Wizard of Oz. Grace credits her preschool obsession with the movie and its songs as her first experience with music and the first sign of an inclination towards the art form. She started classical guitar lessons at 7 years old and by the time she was 9, it was clear Grace wanted to sing and perform. Replacing “Schmidhauser” with “London” (because it’s more memorable and easier to say), a young Grace started out by playing small coffeeshop shows. By middle school, after a brief stint playing with the pop punk band Residual Kid and auditioning for America’s Got Talent, she was a fully fledged songwriter and established musician in the Austin scene. However, Grace thinks that her young age definitely had a certain degree of influence on her early success.

           “When you’re a 9-year-old girl, people are going to be really nice to you either way,” she explained. “People think you’re kind of cute, and it’s kind of a novelty.”

           Novelty act or not, Grace was certainly talented and has worked to make the difficult transition to becoming a performer who will be taken seriously. Refraining from performing as much during her freshman year, Grace focused on refining her writing skills and working on developing her music to new levels of maturity. She also chose not to capitalize on her age anymore, something she could have easily done as a 14-year-old girl. Grace also had to get used to being treated as an older performer, not a child who got compliments thrown at her every time she took the stage, competing for attention against other adult musicians, trying to be taken seriously, and not being seen as “just good for her age.”

           “I was kind of used to people constantly praising me and being really nice,” Grace admitted.

           Grace, only 16 and has already been writing and performing for seven years, has only one year of high school left. Although there is that certain amount of uncertainty that’s present in all upcoming seniors’ lives, Grace knows for sure that she will continue to write music and pursue a career in the music industry, though perhaps not exclusively in performing.

           “There’s so many jobs in the music industry, and I don’t want to limit myself to just performing aspects of it,” she said. “Songwriting for other people is something I’d be really interested in.”

It was a New York University summer music program that she went to last year that made Grace aware of the many options that she had as a musician. Having a steady job—whether songwriting, producing, or music journalism—she realized, allows her to continue to perform and make music without having to compromise any of its artistic integrity to make money. Now she plans to go to college not just for music, but also for business, songwriting, and production, or perhaps get an internship somewhere where she can learn the skills necessary to be successful in the music business and make connections in the industry. While she is interested in other aspects of the music business, Grace still plans to write music and perform after high school.

            “I definitely want to continue to pursue a career in performing but I don’t want to limit myself,” she said.

When asked if she thought she was a successful musician at the present moment, Grace stuttered. Of course, relative to other 16-year-olds, she is. She has a booking agent and a website, a Spotify page and an album review in The Austin Chronicle. If you hold her career to the definition of success that many people have—fame, money, playing sold out arenas every night—she hasn’t even made a dent. Grace, however, says that that’s no longer her definition of success. It was when she was younger but not anymore.

“I don’t know, I’ve accomplished a lot of things that I’ve wanted to by this point in my life,” she said. “I wouldn’t call myself a successful musician but I think that I’ve been successful in trying to grow in my music and working really hard on it and making sure that I’m setting myself up to pursue that later on in my life.”

Check out Grace’s music of iTunes, Bandcamp, Spotify, and gracelondon.com