Bored Of U
Grace Calver has a great way with words – she’s proven that with her music blogging over the years, and more recently she has been revealing another side to her creativity by sharing her own songs with the world. Those songs are strongly personal, refreshingly honest and very, very catchy, combining elements of bedroom-pop and alt-rock extremely effectively.
Bored of U is Grace’s second release, and a natural follow-up to the first single, Zombie Conversations which (as I’ve written elsewhere), explored up-to-date versions of well-known themes of disappointment and frustration with people.
This single has a (well-timed) summery vibe, but don’t let that deceive you: once again, Grace doesn’t mince her words as she gently but firmly lays into an ex, creating the sonic equivalent of sticking up a middle-finger. She also engages in some deceptively heavy self-analysis, opening her heart wide and revealing an uncanny ability to neatly sum-up, through music, the turbulence of life experience.
Grace says: “The song was written about a past relationship where my view of the situation was very different to that of the other person. The realisation towards the end that it wasn’t serious and ‘I was just a distraction’, culminating in me getting confused by them acting hot and cold and bored of being treated in this way.”
That theme is apparent from the get go. Bored of U launches – after a few bars of immediately-evocative, clean guitar chords – with a classic line: “I hate you again, but if you held out your hand I’d still take it” . A little later, Grace gets into some further analysis, packaging her thoughts in a neatly rhymed format, with an endearingly tongue-in-cheek approach.
“You’re just a narcissist who hated waking up alone,
And you weren’t ever there when I called you on the phone.
It was all in my head, it was all an over-reaction,
We both know what you said: I was just a distraction”
And she sings all of this with a heartfelt honesty: relaxed and at the same time precise. Her choice of musical underlay is well-judged, too: you can feel her many musical influences being reflected in those jangly guitars, the soft, twinkly synths and some great harmonies (Grace contributed all of those instrumental elements, too). She mentions Declan McKenna, Mitski and The Cure specifically, and yes – I can hear all of those here. But she’s absorbed the work of those artists – and probably many more – considered it all carefully, and passed it through her own creative filters to create that “Grace Calver sound” which even the most jaded old muso couldn’t fail to smile at.
There’s a lot more to come from Grace – don’t miss it.
Grace Calver is an 18-year-old singer/songwriter living on the Suffolk/Essex border. She appeared on the Inbetweeners Stage at Latitude Festival in 2021 and has a number of gigs lined up this summer. Bored Of U was recorded, produced, mixed and mastered at North Acre Studios in Cambridgeshire (with Jake Day from Tom Lumley and the Brave Liaison).
LISTEN TO BORED OF U ON SPOTIFY
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Words by Phil Taylor
The songbird 