Singers with Unique Voices: Christina Grimmie (The Unique Voices Club #11)

Every Friday, I write a post about singers with unique voices not commonly heard in mainstream music in an effort to educate emerging artists and music lovers and inspire them to embrace their own quirks. This week I'm writing on Christina Grimmie.

Since not a lot of people (outside of her fandom) know offhand the tragedy of Christina Grimmie as it happened years ago, I'm going to place a note here that this post mentions suicide and murder with guns. So if any of this triggers you, go check out my earlier Unique Voices Club posts. And subscribe so that you can get future posts directly in your inbox.

I was reading a Reddit post a while ago where someone said that celebrities shouldn't openly date or make it known they're in a relationship. And why? Because spending time with the person you're dating allegedly takes away from time spent on your craft and your fans and staying famous. And it's been a thing with K-pop or J-pop idols because apparently fans are entitled to the celebrity's undying devotion to keep their fans happy. None of these are my actual thoughts though, because reading this post made me lose a few brain cells. Celebrities are still people who deserve to live however they wish as long as it isn't dangerous to the lives of others, in my opinion.

For Christina Grimmie, although she wasn't on the level of Beyonce but still famous enough that Selena Gomez was friends with her and what happened was in the news, this entitlement mentality of certain deranged fans led to a tragic ending. Similar to the story of a K-pop singer who had a stalker fan who did unspeakable things to her, this specific fan (who thought he was destined to marry her despite not them not knowing each other) found out Christina was dating someone else and shot her and then himself at a meet-and-greet in 2016. Neither survived. It's scary to be famous sometimes. Even Chadwick Boseman was bullied online for looking emaciated when he was dying. (Both he and Christina are the only celebrity deaths I've cried over.) Besides sharing unique voices, as this blog does, we also need to invest more in artist security. Thankfully things were more tight on that front when I saw Sawyer Fredericks about a month later.

The reason I'm including Christina Grimmie in this week's Unique Voices Club post isn't to highlight what happened to her. It's to highlight the reason we all loved her in the first place: her voice. And her giving personality. When she went on The Voice back in 2014, her YouTube channel had over 2M subscribers (close to 4M at the time I'm writing this). And as she took to the stage and gave a performance of "Wrecking Ball" that made me forget Miley Cyrus existed, it wasn't hard to figure out why all four coaches were fighting for her.

Usher called her a baby Celine Dion, while she cited Christina Aguilera as her main vocal influence as well as Stacie Orrico, Whitney Houston and Lady Gaga. We definitely can hear Christina Aguilera's soulful influence on her vocal runs all the way to the top of her range, but Christina Grimmie's light-lyric soprano voice possesses a warm, soft tone and an almost elastic quality, like a rubber band that keeps stretching and stretching the higher and higher she goes but never snaps. It reminds me of pop artists in the early 2000s such as Stacie Orrico and Disney artists of that era where there's a slight nasal quality to the diction of notes, but obviously where Christina differs from them is her range and also the production of her songs that lean away from the electropop quality of some pop songs in the 2010s.

The song that I'm guilty of having on repeat is "With Love," the single she performed in the finale of The Voice (still don't know how she didn't win) that the Facebook page shared along with a blacked-out profile picture after her passing. It was the very first song she wrote for her second album of the same name, where she's talking to a close friend of hers or to God. Since she was a Christian (like me), the perspective of speaking to God makes the most sense. Ironically this song is also playing while I'm writing this paragraph, and I'm tearing up a little bit at the balladic quality that accompanies those special lyrics. Hopefully you give this song a listen, since it shows a softer side to Christina's vocals and gives her warm tone a place to really stand out. And maybe her cover of Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek" that starts off as a vocoder ballad and then goes into full production halfway through the song. That's the power of art.

Even after her death, Christina's family still shares old video footage of her perfoming and posthumously releases music of hers that had already been recorded before she died. The popular Joji song "Glimpse of Us" was inspired by her. Her family founded the Christina Grimmie Foundation, aiming to support those affected by gun violence and/or breast cancer (her mom would pass from it two years after her daughter's murder). The Humane Society of the United States would create the Christina Grimmie Animal Medical Fund in honor of her activism for animal rights, and they would posthumously give her the Impact Award. So you see, her legacy goes beyond her music. What a beautiful soul. I'm also pissed off that I never got to see her live. But the music lives on.

So this is where I'm going to sign off this week, fellow firebirds. Sorry it's a long one. You can tell I had a lot to say. But if you want next week's Unique Voices Club post directly to your inbox, subscribe at the bottom. And to help me promote the power of unconvention and nonconformity, join my Patreon here for only $7. There's strength in numbers.

Stay educated,

Alexia