Grace Bowers Was 'So Sick' of Singing Other People's Songs — So the Guitarist Put Out Her Own Album (Exclusive)

Grace Bowers did not write "Madame President" for Kamala Harris.

In fact, the beginnings of the song began long before the political upheaval that now has Harris running for the highest position in the country. Instead, the hopeful song created by Bowers alongside Esther Okai-Tetteh and Maggie Rose simply contained their wishes for the world someday.

But that someday came quick.

"When we got the news (about Vice President Harris' presidential bid), we were like, 'Well, damn, "Madame President" now takes on a whole new meaning,'" Bowers, 18, stresses during an interview with PEOPLE. "You just never know."

Nevertheless, the foreshadowing song is sure to get Bowers’ music further noticed in the turbulent months ahead. But with those blonde curls, she's hard to ignore to begin with.

"If I showed you a picture of me three years ago, you'd be like, 'Who is that?'" says Bowers, whose curly locks showed up in all their glory just in the past few years. "For a while, I didn't even know I had curly hair, so I just brushed right through it. It was not good. So, it's been a process of finding a routine that works. You just got to embrace it."

Certainly, the breakthrough guitarist, songwriter and bandleader has long embraced music, having first picked up the guitar at 9 years old and eventually falling in love with it four years later. 

"I was sitting in my mom's car flipping through radio stations, and all of a sudden B.B. King comes on and he's playing this song called 'Sweet Little Angel,' which is off of his first album,” says Bowers, who made her Grand Ole Opry debut last month on her 18th birthday. "It just struck me because I had never heard anything like that before. I immediately went home and started learning a lot of B. B. King."

From there, the guitar playing continued, eventually reaching a place of mastery that had the music industry using words such as 'prodigy' when describing the California native. 

"The word ‘prodigy’ gets thrown around a lot and there's definitely prodigies out there, but I am not one of them,” admits Bowers, who is nominated for instrumentalist of the year at the 2024 Americana Music Association Honors & Awards this September. "I was horrible when I first started playing. There was nothing natural about it. I also don't come from a musical family. It took years and years and hours and hours of practice to get me to where I am."

Practice was also required when it came to songwriting, which Bowers she still is attempting to perfect. "I was doing a lot of session work and I just got so sick of playing other people's songs and sticking to a script and having other people telling me what to play," she explains. "I wanted to play my own songs and I wanted to have my own voice because I have stuff to say."

And she says it all on her highly anticipated debut album, Wine on Venus, produced by none other than Brother Osborne's John Osborne.

"When I went to John's studio and we sat down and we talked about the sound I wanted to get, I just felt like he got it and that he was going to understand what I wanted," says Bowers. "I knew the moment I sat down with him that he was the one I wanted to work with. I can't imagine doing it with anyone else."

Certainly, Osborne's influence can be heard throughout the entirety of Wine on Venus, an album that delivers a similar pulsating electricity to what Bowers delivers during her live shows.

"I've done lots of session work before, and I usually hate it," admits Bowers with a laugh. "So before we went into the studio, I was very adamant with the sound I wanted. I wanted the band to be in the same room making eye contact with each other, and I wanted them playing their instruments live. I wanted to capture that energy."

The energy even comes through on the album’s purely instrumental offerings. "'Won No Teg' was literally recorded live," explains Bowers, who released the first single off the album "Tell Me Why U Do That" back in May, and whose group Bowers and The Hodge Podge will continue to tour through this fall.

"It wasn't something that we wrote. It was like, let's just sit down and jam in the key of G and do something kind of trippy. What's most important to me is the songs. I feel like there's a lot of jam bands out there right now. They can jam, but they don't have songs. I love jam bands just as much as I love songs, so I wanted to have some sort of instrumental aspect to it."