If you don’t pick it up, it’ll stop calling you

Manu Grace

Words: Dan Charles

Photos: Tao Farren-Hefer / Akira Tree

“I’m so bored with myself!” complains Manu Grace almost as soon as we start our conversation. She’s talking to me from her bedroom-studio in London, where she has been painstakingly watching herself over and over again while editing footage that had just been sent of her recent performance in Berlin - one of the first performances that she’s given in a very long time. She tells me that it’s dangerous to delve straight into the footage because it can quickly tarnish the memory of how it felt to actually play her songs and share them with a room full of people. I imagine it must be similar to what happens to your brain when you repeat a word so many times that it starts to lose all of its meaning. I imagine that, after so many years without sharing any new music, Manu wants to hold on tightly to the meaning she has found in her songs again.

In 2020, Manu released No Room For Error - a sonically rich travelogue of the feelings of desire and disappointment evoked from a short-lived romance across Europe. The first single, Two Weeks, premiered live on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 radio show on Apple Music, and it received a glowing reception from a slew of sweet, soft-hearted listeners who were immediately drawn to her unabashedly vulnerable and sensitive approach to songcraft. 

Shows were then starting to get booked with bigger and more acclaimed artists like Maya Hawke (if you don’t know her music, you might know her from a little show that used to be on Netflix called Stranger Things) and the legendary John Cale, of the Velvet Underground. To borrow a famous quote from Cameron Crowe’s classic coming-of-age film Almost Famous, it was “all happening” during that time.

A fulfilling career as a songsmith awaited Manu Grace, but it was halted by the unforeseeable. While the world was thrust into lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, Manu continued to write new material to follow up her last EP with her frequent collaborators Ross Dorkin and Rob Brink. But the songs were beginning to suffer. She was working in Cape Town at the time, while Ross and Rob were based in London and Berlin, respectively, and the distance between the three began to undermine their collaboration. The sharing of files back and forth began to resemble what Manu describes as the road-trip game, where each person draws a part of a figure without seeing what came before. “Somebody would open the project and add some stuff as a placeholder idea. Then the next person opens up the project, doesn't know where the idea was supposed to go, but they pick it up and do something,” she explains. “It was a little bit bonkers.”

Compared to how they worked together on No Room For Error - ten days together in Berlin with everyone in the same room, creative decisions feeling unanimous and aligned - the remote process left the songs feeling unresolved and uncertain of what they wanted to be. And so they were put aside.

Manu had no intention of abandoning those songs, but after the remote sessions with Ross and Rob, the world around her soon became a heavier and heavier place to live in. Her father died. And then her grandmother. And this was all within a time when the world had just begun to be inundated with horrific footage of the genocide in Gaza. The air was rife with grief - for those whom she loved and for those who had everything that they had loved violently taken away from them. It made it hard to sing pop songs, and so performing became almost impossible. She tried a few times but found that the vulnerability of her songs, combined with her own raw emotional state, was too much to bear.

“To be so vulnerable when you are so vulnerable - I found it really hard,” she says quietly. “There was a period where it was like, ‘You just need to do your job; it’s okay, just keep posting.’ And then it was like, “What the fuck am I making noise about my silly little pop songs for? Who do I think I am?”

Grief combined with the profound difficulty of making noise about pop songs during a period of global atrocity paralyzed her with questions of relevance. The songs that had been lingering on her hard drive felt like they were from another lifetime, and the person who sang them became unrecognizable to her. “Who was that who made those songs?” she recalls thinking. “There’s no way I can present them or relate to them.”

When the weight of tragedy - whether it is personal or existential - tethers itself to you, you have no choice but to carry it for a while. So often, we think we have to carry it alone, and that is how tragedy and grief can quickly buckle our knees and send us plummeting into the depths of immense sorrow. It can cause our hearts to wither into emotional atrophy while we struggle against it, making it yet another mournful weight to carry rather than something that helps with all the other carrying. Manu is the kind of songwriter who is naturally compelled to put her whole heart into her craft, and so, in the depths of that all-consuming sorrow, it is no wonder that she decided that she had to put down her songs - the many pieces of her heart - to ease the load.

“It's like, surely you have to find other things that make life on earth kind of manageable?” she recalls asking herself. “I guess I did in that period of not having had music at the center of my universe, which was kind of the first time that had ever happened. But it was really scary. I did find other things to be joyful about, but everything felt so flat. 

I was so miserable.”

She knew she wasn’t well after returning home from some traveling. Travel is something Manu has always found immense joy in - it’s what has inspired much of the music in No Room For Error and much of her work - but coming back left her with an unrecognizable emptiness that frightened her. Her heart, in its atrophy, could no longer feel joy and wonder as it used to.

“I know it sounds quite dramatic, and I don't really know how to put it without sounding - I don't know…” she says, a bit hesitantly. “Life's really not interesting enough without it.”

While visiting her mother in Scarborough, she confided this feeling to her mother. Her mother is a writer, so she knows about the pitfalls of a life that revolves around making art and the damage that can result from abandoning it. What her mother told her read both as guidance and almost as a warning: “If you don’t pick it up, it’ll stop calling you.”

When she was younger, Manu and her mother would spend a lot of time visiting a children’s home before her younger brother came to live with them. There was a room there that was full of tiny babies that the staff had prohibited them from picking up because, once they were put back down, they would begin to cry. “I feel so deeply affected by that,” she tells me. “If you put a kid down for long enough for it to stop crying, it just stops asking for help or love.”

The process of picking her craft back up was not particularly romantic or thrilling. 

It began, simply, with a checklist. When Manu returned to London, they got strict 

with themselves and, so every day the checklist had to be completed: play an instrument, write something, and sing - even if only for three minutes. It was mechanical at first - like forcing yourself to eat when you have no appetite. “But slowly, slowly everything started to thaw out,” she explains. “And it worked - just actually forcing yourself to show up and do the thing.” Eventually, music became something that no longer felt forced. Ideas were streaming in, and everything felt exciting again. New songs were being written.

Although new ideas were calling Manu back to the studio, the old songs had also started to cry out for her - less like newborns, more like ghosts that had grown tired of haunting her hard drive and her head and wished to be exercised. And they were being really naggy about it. 

“Maybe I'm giving away my roots a little bit too much - I'm going to sound terribly Scarborough now - but they were taking up so much spiritual space; it's almost like they had to be purged,” she says. “So I had to honor the songs and let them live.”

This is why Manu is back in her studio now, editing footage of herself performing a song that had long since cried for her after being laid down in the cradle of her hard drive for years. The song is called Oh Man, I’ve Done It Again and is the title track of her latest EP, set to be released later this year. It is an EP that mostly consists of songs she never finished and sees Manu making peace with the time she has lost after abandoning these pieces of her old self, making them part of who she is today. The EP closes with one of the first new songs that she had written in quite some time, and it ends with the words:

”I've never kept anything as private as I have this grief. I've never known numbness to feel like a sigh of relief. I've never known someone whose wordlessness felt quite so deep. Oh, how am I to find the words for something so unique?”

It is often impossible to find the words. It is often, more so, to find the right music to convey them. But sometimes they themselves can find their way to you. They can cry for you. But only if you pick them up.

MANU GRACE

@_manugrace