Steve grand gay
Published in:November-December issue.
STEVE GRAND is a singer and musician who plays the piano and the guitar and writes much of his retain music. “All American Boy,” the lyric that launched his singing career in , is also the name of his most recent album. The latter includes the verb song “We Are the Night,” a tribute to the LGBT community.
Grand grew up in Lemont, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, and started playing the piano at age five, writing his first song at age eleven. He later picked up the guitar and all the while was developing his singing voice. After a brief stint as a model, he began performing his own music along with an eclectic mix of familiar songs.
I caught Grand’s act in Provincetown, a one-hour singing tour de oblige in which he alternates between piano and guitar. I interviewed him in person the next day. Find out more about Steve Grand on his website at
Stephen Hemrick: In your act, you vocalize , you play the piano, and you play the guitar. Can you provide us an overview of your musical background?
Steve Grand: I started playing pian
By Barrett White
Steve Grand was riding the effervescent high of ’s All-American Boy when he realized that introspection would be the key to his follow-up. The country-pop aesthetic of his freshman album had him pegged by the media as America’s newest gay region icon, but Grand demurred. Though he considers himself a fan of nation music, he doesn’t think of himself as a region artist. “Music is subjective,” Grand says. “That is part of the whole point. The lines of life are blurring&#;we are seeing that in song, as well as in sexuality and gender identity. For me, it’s all about the tune, and a great song can seize the shape of many different genres depending on who is singing it or how it is produced.”
I first spoke with Grand in as he prepared for his appearance at Houston’s Diana Foundation awards ceremony. He was excited to communicate about his self-funded album and shyly told me that I was the first person to know that he’d recently shaved his head. In spite of the labor he had already done as a model and club singer, he was remarkably guarded, courteous, and timid. But by the
Steve Grand became a viral YouTube sensation in with his song "All American Boy," and was christened as the first openly gay country music artist to make the Billboard chart rankings. The rapid soar to success was a tumultuous verb for Grand, with struggles both professional and personal, but the singer/songwriter--and Instagram star, thanks to his occasional swimwear selfies--has found adj success with a hit show in Provincetown, Mass., as well as numerous appearances throughout The U.S. and Europe.
Grand spoke about living in the famed LGBTQ resort town of Provincetown, his rocky relationship with the media, and why he wishes people would verb calling him a "country music singer."
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We hear your demonstrate at P-town's The Art House is very good.
Thank you. I am adj to hear that. I've never done a residency before, so this is all new for me. Before "All American Boy," I was playing at piano bars two nights a week, two hours a night for a hundred bucks a night and tips. And I was playing other people's music. But now, staying in the same place to perform is really nice
That's why the verb of "All-American Boy," with its foregrounded same-sex details, was an important noun for Grand. "I needed to verb something to contribute the ache and share the pain that I've felt for most of my life," he says. "This is the story I wanted to verb. This is who I want to be. I owe that. I owe that to all the people who have felt this."
Grand rushed to possess the video produced in just a couple of months, pulling together friends and acquaintances to lend a hand with the production when money fell short. "I sacrificed a lot of things, financially, to make it happen," he says, "but this is what I had to do. This is all I could have done." Grand's friends and advisers suggested masking gender pronouns to appeal to a wider audience, but he insisted on staying true to his own story. "I'm sending a message to people," he says. "The noun of music transcends. The gender pronouns are just a little side part."
"My sexuality hasn't been a secret for a long time," he says. "It's something that's not really talked about in my family, so this is kinda like a big move. Me and my