Everyone loves a guitar hero. And young talents who seem to have arrived fully formed, too. So there’s a lot of love in the room for Grace Bowers, the 18-year-old who this year became the fretboard’s new best friend. A player since age 9, Bowers made a name for her music on Instagram and YouTube during the pandemic, but really came into her own in August with her swaggering, blues- and funk-filled debut, “Wine on Venus.” The album’s gutsy rhythms, taut solos and soulful, self-penned songs offer proof positive of her six-string mastery.
“I’m very driven at the things that I want,” says Bowers from her Nashville home. “And, I’m extremely hard-working.”
Bowers is quick to state that music didn’t come naturally. At first. “I tried lots of hobbies at 9, and got kicked out of them all,” she says. “I was bad at sports. The guitar looked cool.” Jamming on an off-brand acoustic purchased by her mom, Bowers fell in love with the guitar’s crunch listening to the radio in the family car. “My favorite stations, then, were Ozzy’s Boneyard and Hair Nation – cheesy metal – which is embarrassing now as I don’t play anything like that,” she says, laughing.
Then Bowers landed on a station playing B.B. King’s “Sweet Little Angel,” and found an emotive power more haunting than metal’s shredding. “He struck a chord inside me. I never knew you could do that with a guitar.”
Popular on Variety
A fast history lesson through Mississippi John Hurt and T-Bone Walker pushed her into Parliament-Funkadelic and Sly & the Family Stone territory, groove-oriented vibes that helped develop her guitar stylings. “R&B is what I listen to mostly, still; I love Hiatus Kaiyote, Steve Lacy and, on the funkier side, Corey Henry,” she says.
For all her influences, Bowers proudly doesn’t sound like any of them. She can’t wait for January when she’ll join Bob Weir at his Dead Ahead Fest in Mexico for curated collabs celebrating her beloved Grateful Dead. “That’s a surreal offer,” she enthuses.
There are hints of Sly Stone in “Tell Me Why U Do That,” the Beatles’ psychedelic period on “Lucy” (“I was actually looking for a Doobie Brothers sound with my 12-string”), and Eddie Hazel Funkadelic licks throughout the whole of “Wine on Venus.”
Once Bowers truly committed to music, her mom moved the family to Nashville in 2021. “I was doing gigs at dive bars every night,” she says, but the first show she played under her own name was the Newport Folk Festival. There, having run through a setlist with five minute still left, “I turned to the band and said, ‘Let’s jam something in F,’ and it sounded amazing. In that moment, I knew I wanted to do my own thing and have my own voice.”
After Newport, Bowers wrote original music for an album debut she insisted be powerful, “from top-to-bottom, no skipping around, and old school-sounding,” she says of “Wine on Venus,” produced by Brothers Osborne guitarist John Osborne. “I wanted a throwback approach: Have an instrumental intro, then a track, then an organ interlude, then one song running into another. Next album, I’ll do something more modern-sounding… a cleaner funk sound.”
For every party song gracing “Wine on Venus,” another is flush with purpose. Take “Madame President,” co-written with Maggie Rose. Discussing homelessness and rising debt, Bowers came up with the line “Maybe while I’m still alive we’ll see a madame president” without connection, initially, to 2024’s election. “That song is about change,” Bowers says. “Am I disappointed by the election’s results? Unbelievably. But it’s only four years. We’re going to be all right.”
From the sound and fury of “Wine on Venus,” it’s clear that Grace Bowers is definitely going to be all right.