Demi Grace Talks ‘Blackcurrant,’ & How She Made A Home Studio Her Therapy Outlet
“Its gonna hurt your feelings and that's okay,” Demi Grace sings on the third track of Blackcurrant. “I’m Okay” was one of the Nigerian British-born artist's favorite songs on the project and as she slowly exposed the meaning behind her album, the line was a missing piece of an aspect the artist has been searching for all along, herself.
“I just got to the place where I don’t cry when I listen to it,” she said about ‘I’m Okay’. “When you’re finding yourself I think that as a woman that is one of the hardest obstacles is hurting someone’s feelings in the process of putting yourself first.”
Just as coming to the comfortability in one’s own skin, Demi Grace’s recording of Blackcurrant mirrored some of the song’s themes unknowingly. The Harlem-based recording artist began writing and creating over the pandemic where she set up her own home studio. She described the process as her own sense of “therapy” and how she hopes her music can relate to her audience.
“We were all on lockdown and I didn’t know what was coming next like all of us. One of my biggest therapy outlets is music. Because I didn’t know what was coming up next, I just wrote whatever,” she explained. “Before that I heavily relied on what producers were saying needs to be out there, what other songwriters were saying, managers, or labels were saying, I really never had the chance to just do what I wanted to do whether the songs connected or not with each other.
I recorded myself pretty much every day over the course of three months. Some days I just had the energy for covers but it was really therapy for me so I just did it anyway. By the time I was done I finished about 45 songs.”
After going through nearly 50 songs, the singer knew what she had to do next, free them.
“Some of those songs I felt like they needed to be put out into the world. I haven’t put an album out in a really long time and I don’t know what’s going on in the industry or what’s going to happen but I'm going to put a project together and put it out there and just see.”
She admitted that it wasn’t the easiest choice to release her music without the feedback that she normally had from music professionals.
“It was really tough for me to not ask anyone for advice. I bought home recording so that i can record myself at home and i wasn’t in the studio without any engineer or producer or someone to give me feedback or an opinion on if the songs sounds good or bad or what it needs. So I was really guiding myself throughout the entire process and then I sent it off to be mixed and that was the only level of feedback I got before I released it.”
Black Currant has been followed up with several visual components since its November 2022 release. The singer has dropped the visuals to "Clingy," "Stay," and "I'm Okay." On Wednesday (April 19), the singer released the music video to “Save Me,” which follows her revisiting a relationship and moving towards finding herself.
Take a look at our full interview with Demi Grace above and watch her latest music video, “Save Me” below: