We recently had the chance to connect with Grace Mitchell and have shared our conversation below.
Grace, so good to connect and we’re excited to share your story and insights with our audience. There’s a ton to learn from your story, but let’s start with a warm up before we get into the heart of the interview. What do the first 90 minutes of your day look like?
I drag myself out of bed early before the sun is up either from my alarm or my daughter’s babbling coming through the baby monitor. Depending on what day of the week, I’m either rushing through the morning or handing my daughter off to one of the family members before I make the 60min commute to my job. On the way I’m listening Morbid – a true crime podcast that usually really distracts my mind from the long drive. I work for Australia’s largest independent music and live events promoter as the Executive Assistant to the Managing Partners. My job is super fast paced and unique and I feel really excited to be working for a cool company that a lot of people admire for their cultural impact in the Australian live events landscape in particular. Coming from an artist’s background, it’s been such a sea change to now be working on the business side of the music industry.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
My name’s Grace Mitchell. I’m a mom, musician, and music industry professional working and living out of Melbourne, Australia. I moved here from Los Angeles three years ago, and it’s been a surreal life change. What landed me here was a draw to reconnect with my family and birth dad, who I’d been estranged from my entire life. My mom is American and moved us back to Oregon, where she was born and raised, when I was very little, leaving my dad and my whole paternal side of the family behind. I have two half-siblings from my dad who were also left behind when we moved to America, but I have since reconnected with them and am very close to them now that we’re all adults. It makes going out to pubs with them funny because I have a strong American accent and they were both raised in Australia, so we get a lot of raised eyebrows when we say we’re siblings.
I lived in LA from 2015 to 2022 but had been travelling there much earlier than 2015 because I signed a major recording contract with Republic Records when I was 15 and was in the studio a lot, writing with notable producers and performing at a high level. Being a teenager with all that industry pressure affected me in ways I’m just starting to unpack now. It caused irreparable damage to my already strained relationship with my mom and stepdad and left me with a lot of trust issues and a very jaded perspective on the music industry, which I ultimately view as flawed and oversaturated. I’ve since rebuilt my relationship with music and am finding my real tone of voice after feeling like it was lost for so long. Being a mom has deeply informed my true self-worth and sense of purpose. When I came to Melbourne, I was after new beginnings, and I got everything I wanted and more by taking a leap of faith. Now I’m on the journey to speak out more about what happened, what led me here, and what I’m going to do about it next.
Okay, so here’s a deep one: Who were you before the world told you who you had to be?
I felt pressure from all sides when I was so young that remembering a time when I got to just be myself means going all the way back to before high school, even middle school. I was always passionate about music, always creative, and interested in fashion, sports, and culture. I loved to collage and mood board my life. I was an avid reader and music consumer. My cousin Julia, who is a few years older than me and now owns the successful café Luna Bakery on Palms Highway in Yucca Valley with her wonderful husband Ian, was a huge influence on what I listened to, watched, and consumed. She’d write me long letters on her typewriter telling me about what she was into at the time she was in High School and eventually College. She even went so far as to download her entire iTunes music library onto my iPod when I was twelve. That’s where so much of my musical influence and references come from.
Was there ever a time you almost gave up?
Yes, I’ve wanted to give up many times, but I never have. I’ve always just done what I had to do to get by until the next thing happened… and the next thing… and the next. I’ve had so many odd jobs while living in LA, trying to do music at the same time, which any entertainer in LA knows is near impossible. When I was dropped from Republic, I wanted to give up. When I had my first show back after getting dropped and after COVID at the Echo, and it was a total bomb, even though I’d rehearsed for months, I cried for hours the next day and called my manager to tell him I was completely done with music.
I wanted to give up after I had a traumatic breakup with a guy and musical collaborator who I thought I was going to be with forever. That breakup even led me to take the leap of faith in moving back to Melbourne and being with my family. I needed a change of pace, but I didn’t give up then either. I started a band when I moved here called Emotion Picture, and the band quickly gained traction. I felt like I was firing on all cylinders again. Then, when that band abruptly disbanded due to interpersonal issues, I wanted to quit again. But now, over a year later from that last moment of wanting to quit, I’m going back into the studio to record more music, this time finishing what I started last year when I began recording my debut solo LP while I was pregnant. I’m writing and composing it entirely by myself, and it’s been the most cathartic experience.
Sure, so let’s go deeper into your values and how you think. What’s a belief you used to hold tightly but now think was naive or wrong?
When I was young, trying to justify the creative decisions my record label was making for me, I’d tell myself, “I just have to do whatever they say until this project takes off, and then I can start doing what I actually want to do.” I was so young that backing myself didn’t feel like an option, but I wish I had been able to advocate for myself and say I didn’t align with what they wanted for me. That I didn’t like the music I was making, and I didn’t enjoy going into studio environments with countless collaborators trying to churn out “hits.” I wish I had said “no” to the sexual advances made by my producers, and I wish I had stood up for myself and said, “Hey, this isn’t right, I want to stop and do my own thing.”
I don’t believe an artist should ever compromise their creative vision or bend to a more marketable sound or path an industry executive has in mind. You don’t need to grit your teeth and appeal to the masses to fit someone else’s agenda. Your fans will only ever connect with your true, authentic self. I wish I had known that then.
Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. Are you doing what you were born to do—or what you were told to do?
I wonder about this a lot. I find myself daydreaming about a life where I was never exposed to the entertainment industry so early on, or fed the narrative that I had to go down the path of music in order to succeed. The construct I was programmed to think in started so young that I wonder if I would have always chosen to pursue music above everything else.
Besides now being a mom, being a musician is always at the forefront of my mind, always lingering and humming away like something hanging over my head that I haven’t achieved yet. But making music isn’t about achieving benchmarks. It’s about creativity and self-expression.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: gracemitchell
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grace-mitchell-3271a036b/
- Twitter: https://x.com/gracemitchell?lang=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iamgracemitchell/
- Other: Substack https://substack.com/@gracesjournal
Image Credits
Photographer: Madeline Deneys
