H.E.R. performed her new ballad “Sometimes,” produced by the R&B ace D’Mile, at the 62nd Grammy Awards on Sunday.
She was accompanied by four horn players and four string players; the extra instrumental muscle helped fill out the spare piano melody of “Sometimes.”
“I had a plan, I had it mapped out,” H.E.R. sang. “I knew where I was going when I left out.” During the bridge, the singer abandoned the piano to play a stirring, ornate guitar solo; she also played a few of these during Pepsi commercials that ran periodically throughout the evening.
H.E.R., a.k.a. Gabi Wilson, won two Grammys last year, taking home Best R&B Album for her self-titled compilation LP (which was also nominated for Album of the Year) and Best R&B Performance for “Best Part.” Her track “Focus” was also nominated for Best R&B Song. This year, the singer earned five nominations, including Record of the Year for “Hard Place” and Album of the Year for I Used to Know Her.
Even though H.E.R. is just 22, she’s been in the music business for many years already. “It’s one thing to be able to sing well, but another to be an artist and find your own voice within music,” Wilson told Rolling Stone this past December. “And that’s what the goal was for me in my teenage years. I had to find myself. As a young woman, I experienced high school and heartbreak, and the music I started to write was a little bit more poetic, and more inspired by spoken word. The real raw emotional things that sit in the back of our minds, that you were afraid to say? That’s how I started to write my music. And that’s how H.E.R. Volume One came about.”
