The next star out of Pittsburgh might not be another rapper from Allderdice, but a pop singer from Mt. Lebanon High School.
Earlier this week, while her friends were in school, 17-year-old Grace Tandon, better known as Daya, was waking up in Los Angeles for a writing/recording session for her debut album.
Already, she has entered the Billboard charts with her first EP (No. 161), led by a single, “Hide Away,” that has more than 2 million views on YouTube and hit No. 24 on the pop songs chart.
On Friday, her six-song EP will be released in physical form at Target, and on Saturday she will be on stage for the Halloween party for her favorite radio station, KISS-FM, at Stage AE, a concert venue where she has seen favorite artists like Ed Sheeran, Twenty One Pilots and Ingrid Michaelson.
It’s all happening at viral speed.
“Yeah, definitely,” she says. “I was not expecting this. It’s been my dream since I was a little girl and I knew it would be my career at some point. I didn’t know how fast everything would go. I should be right now a normal 17-year-old sitting in class in high school. Instead, I’m recording and it’s so exciting for me. I can’t imagine anything I’d rather be doing right now.“
Truthfully, Daya is a few steps above normal. She’s been playing piano since she was 3 and has been studying classical piano and vocal over the last eight years. She also plays guitar, ukulele, saxophone and flute.
Her early teen years offered new influences.
“I switched into the pop/R&B genre a couple years ago,” she says, “because I started writing songs and I was listening to people like Adele and Amy Winehouse for inspiration.”
Her break came via music producer and songwriter Gino Barletta, who made regular visits to speak to students at the Accelerando Music Conservatory in Peters, where she was studying. The CMU grad had his biggest success co-writing the 2011 JoJo hit “Disaster.”
“I met Daya when she was 12 years old,” he says. “At the time, I was running a summer workshop with two of my colleagues from Los Angeles and wasn't really scouting any talent. But as I continued returning to the conservatory, my conversations with her and her parents about getting her in the studio became more and more serious, and I eventually invited her to L.A. to do some work in the studio.”
“He recognized my potential early on,” she says, “and he kept saying, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing, keep taking lessons and when the time is right, I’ll bring you out to L.A.”
The time was right when she turned 16, and that’s what they did.
“I didn't know how things would go, and honestly, you never really know if you have something special until the singer gets behind the microphone,” he says. “When I heard her voice on ‘Hide Away’ that was when I first REALLY knew we had something special. I knew that the song would resonate with tons of people, and she was the perfect one to carry it for us.”
Daya doesn’t have a sugary, cheerleader voice. Rather, with a big range and vocal maturity beyond her years, she sings in a clipped style closer to Lorde than Katy Perry.
“She is a great inspiration for me,” Daya says of Lorde, who also broke as a teenager. “I love her songs and love her lyrics. I feel like my sound is a little more pop.”
Although it’s a pretty bad film, the current “Jem and the Holograms” shows how a young singer plucked out of high school can be manipulated by producers and managers. Daya, who took her name from the Hindi translation for “Grace” (her grandfather is Indian), is determined not to let that happen.
“I think the most important thing for an artist is to stay true to who you are. I want to stay as authentic as possible as that’s how we’re going with our team. I have a lot of creative control, so I can decide what I want to wear, what I want my brand to look like, what I want my songs to sound like so I don’t sound like some fake artist that people can’t relate to.”
She co-wrote “Hide Away” and “Back to Me” and the team in L.A. was writing songs for her while she was in school, having hashed out what her overall message would be — as though she were ordering it off a menu.
“We talked about general things that we wanted to go with, and I really wanted to go with female empowerment because it’s really important for me to empower girls and tell them they’re beautiful and strong and they can do whatever they put their minds to. That was the general theme and then we built the songs around there. I wouldn’t use a song I didn’t think was my brand or image.”
From there, she was let loose to play shows everywhere from the Mall of America to the Rockefeller Studios of the “Today” show, where she displayed her maturity and sense of fun.
“I didn’t get too nervous because we had rehearsed it a bunch of times, and so when I’m that comfortable with something, it seems like another rehearsal, another practice. So, it was actually fun for me. I loved it. I was a little nervous thinking about it, but once I got on the show, it came naturally.”
While she’s working on her career, she’s taking a few classes online so she can graduate in the spring. The biggest change for her in this rush to fame is the traveling, mostly for radio station visits.
“I’ve been all over the country by now and it’s really cool to see these places and spend like half a day. One day I did three states: Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia. But I’ve always loved traveling.”
As for missing out on her senior year of high school, no big deal, she says.
“I don’t miss going to school every day, but I do miss my family [she has four sisters] and friends a lot, and I wish I could see them more often because I haven’t been home in a couple weeks now.”
Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com; 412-263-2576. Twitter: @scottmervis_pg
First Published: October 29, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
