Grace Ives Joins the Dots Per Inch roster. In advance of her Debut, 2nd, check out her EPs on her Bandcamp page.

There are three obvious reasons why one might pick up an instrument and learn to play: a prodigious talent, a phase of teenage rebellion, or a set of loving yet overbearing parents. The first scenario is ‘eh’, the second is ‘cool’, and the third, not so much. These, of course, are archetypes, more often than not mutually exclusive, and denote a predetermined trajectory. In reality, however, we don’t have to stick to the script. That’s where Grace Ives comes in.

Ives was not possessed with musical passion as a child or teenage delinquent, nor did she fall prey to the wiles of tyrannical parents. No, nothing like that. Rather, Ives is a refreshingly curious mixture of the positive elements of each scenario.

Her parents saw that she was able to play a little baby piano pretty damn well, and threw her into lessons. She was the kid whose parents made her sing in front of the dinner party, but not to no avail. It was this admiration she received from her impromptu crowd of adult fans that made her think, “hey, I actually might have a lil somethin to offer.”

“I was in a pretty crappy band in highschool and we were trying to be really sophisticated, writing lyrics that we thought appealed to our thirty year old parents,” the New York native remarked, her sentimental grin easily discernible through the slick Iphone screen. Then, one day, in the solitude of her pink room, she realized she actually didn’t need a bunch of guys playing bass to cultivate her sound. She realized that not only did she want to do everything herself, she genuinely enjoyed doing everything herself. Following in the footsteps of her teenage idol, M.I.A., Ives went out and purchased a Roland MC-505 and that’s when the sparks started to fly.

Her path to the stage was rather serendipitous, a series of exploratory decisions that somehow harmonized into sense, unmarred by any disaster or heavy existential crisis, and that’s just how she likes to keep her music. “Pop-y, shiny, sing-songy” were the words she used to describe her sound, and they couldn't be more accurate.