Shae Brock was born and raised in Arizona, and her state’s limitless landscape of desert and mountain has worked its way deep into her songwriting. There’s a self-made world of story, color and sound in every piece of music she creates – a process she describes in almost mystical tones: «I can become different songs and different stories and feelings and characters – like one big painting with all different colors.» Not just your generic pop singer, then.
She was 12 and living in Scottsdale (otherwise known as America’s 92nd largest city) when she asked her mother to get her grandpa’s guitar out of the attic. She had known that she wanted to be a musician since she was a Spice Girls-loving three-year-old, singing Wannabe into a Fisher Price karaoke machine, so 12 seemed high time to be getting on with it. Having quietly gathered dust for years, the Yamaha acoustic needed restringing, after which she had to learn to play the thing. «So I made my mom restring it,» she says now, a decade later. «And the guy who painted our house knew guitar, so he taught me a few chords.» The Yamaha, since swapped for a Martin that she’s named Hercules (there’s also an electric Fender Stratocaster called Romeo), was her gateway to unlocking the songs she had in her head. From that starting point, she grew into a pop singer-songwriter who’s the real deal. Here’s Better Tonight, enjoy!
This Is Pop? 