Grace Woodroofe on Reclaiming Music, Healing Through Pain, and Her Inspiring New Era
After an extended break from music, singer-songwriter Grace Woodroofe returns as invigorated as ever. With a new single doing the rounds, the Perth artists talked to The Note about meeting Heath Ledger, returning to the spotlight and finding herself again through music.
Words Emily Wilson // Image Jody Pachniuk
Not everyone can say that late heartthrob and Academy Award-winning legend Heath Ledger kickstarted their career, but Grace Woodroofe can.
The haunting, genre-bending singer-songwriter - who, at the time of our Zoom interview, is preparing to go to London the next day to record - explains that she had recorded and uploaded two songs to triple J Unearthed when she was just seventeen years old. “I went to school with Heath Ledger’s sister, and she ended up showing the songs to him. And he really loved it and ended up flying me to LA in my last year of high school.”
Though over a decade has passed since the whirlwind genesis of her career, her eyes still glitter with disbelief and gratitude. “He really nourished my career and introduced me to a bunch of people, including Ben Harper, who produced my first album. And I’ve been so lucky that that ended up opening so many doors for me.”
An experience that could have been staggering and overwhelming for a teenager felt, to Woodroofe, surprisingly natural. “And I think that probably has a lot to do with Heath and how nurturing and normal he was. I felt really supported from the get-go.”
When she was young, growing up in Perth, Woodroofe felt isolated and at odds with those around her. “I just knew I didn’t want to do the traditional things, or follow the trajectory that my peers in high school wanted to. So that was why when I went to LA and there were all these artists, I was like, ‘My people!’ I didn’t really know anyone like that growing up, so it felt exciting to be immersed in that once I left. But, having said that, there are so many incredible creatives in Perth, and I still work with many of them to this day. So there’s gotta be something to this isolation, I think, that breeds something special and unique in the artists.”
Since signing with Ledger’s label The Masses, her career, though illustrious, has been marked by “ups and downs,” she says. “As there often are in music.”
Grace Woodroofe was poised for success, glory, and creative fulfillment when her life was consumed by an emotionally abusive relationship. Following her debut 2010 album Always Want and her 2015 electronic-pop EP Love It Need It Miss It Want It (under the alias RW Grace), Woodroofe disappeared from the music world altogether at the behest of her controlling ex-partner. Eight years later, 2023 saw her return to the limelight with her characteristic poise and raw sentiment with the single ‘Beginning.’ Earlier this year saw the release of ‘I Love You Babe,’ which she described on an Instagram story as, “Just the beginning of a very long, complicated, intense, beautiful, ugly story.”
‘I Love You Babe’ is almost eerily dreamy. “Nothing matters when you’re around,” she moans, sounding drugged, her voice dizzy and quivering. “Everything I feel is gone.” The sonic bliss is so all-consuming it becomes sinister and disorienting.
Now comes her latest single ‘Happy Again’ - a triumphant, haunting, tragic, euphoric return. After years underwater, Woodroofe is breaking through the surface. The journey has been long and winding and treacherous, but she has found her way back to her guitar and her pen.
“Music is so… This sounds wanky,” she qualifies, laughing. “Music is so ingrained within me. I didn’t choose it, if that makes sense. It’s just there. And I think when I was coming out of the relationship and starting to slowly feel like myself again, I knew that working on music would make me feel even more like myself. Because music was one of the things that my ex-partner was really jealous and critical of. So I felt like I wanted to reclaim that part of myself. But it was also super daunting because I had slipped out of the industry.” When it came to her music career, she felt like she had been set back to the beginning again.
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But the urge to write about this relationship, this dark time in her life, overcame her. “I wanted to make sense of it in my own head and I wanted to make it worth something for me. I wanted to use the pain to create something beautiful.” She explains that for listeners to be able to grasp the totality of her experience, they had to understand just how in love she was in the beginning of the relationship. “So that’s where ‘I Love You Babe’ comes from. I really want to explain to people how much of a dreamland I felt I was in, and how I felt saved by this person.”
Woodroofe’s return to music has been marked by vulnerable disclosure - she is dissecting trauma within her music, and sharing those raw but healing wounds with the world. It can’t always be easy.
“I have a vulnerability hangover at times,” she admits. “It’s hard, you just never know how it’s going to be received by certain people. But I’ve been amazed by my audience and by the feedback, and how much it resonates with people. So that’s a real push to keep going.”
‘Happy Again’ builds into euphoria, a total release of inhibition. Woodroofe’s voice is at her best when radiating over the reverbed guitar: “I never thought I’d be happy again.”
The end of the song sees her screaming - almost yelling - the words, “happy again, happy again, happy again” over and over. Her voice wrenches through the recording - it’s easy to forget when listening to the song through earphones that Woodroofe is not actually performing live in front of you. “That’s the part where I’m really feeling it.” She smiles.
Performing the song sees her reach true catharsis, totally in control of her body and her sound and what she is imparting to other people. “Performing is where I really connect with the songs because I’m not really trying to perfect it, I'm just trying to get the emotion across,” she says. “And I feel like that’s when people really resonate with my music, is when they see it live. And I really was trying to get that rawness across in these recordings.”
Woodroofe is growing into herself, shedding skin. When she was younger, she explains, “I didn’t have a plan. I remember thinking, I’ll never write a song as good as The Beatles so what’s the point?”
But her career just suddenly took off without her making the active choice to pursue it, though it has all, ultimately, after peaks and valleys, worked out for the best. “I can’t imagine doing anything else, at this point. I think that’s why I have that tenacity as well amidst how difficult it is to be a musician nowadays. It’s absolutely rough, it is rough as guts.” She laughs, “On top of having a mental illness, on top of being a sensitive person, it’s fucking hard. So I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t really believe that it was right for me.”
Music - creating it, performing it, sharing it with others - for her, is singular. “It’s just a feeling that I don’t get from anything else.”
‘Happy Again’ by Grace Woodroofe is out now. Lister here.
