A part of Australian singer-songwriter Mallrat, née Grace Shaw, knew her younger sister was going to die. “The idea of suddenly losing my sister felt like a near possibility so many times,” she says. “When you’re preparing for something like that semi-regularly, in hopes of protecting at least a part of your heart, it does weird things to you.”
Shaw’s new single “Horses,” which sounds like a ballad by and for someone deep in the throes of grief, was written before her sister Liv, a poet, died from an opioid overdose last May. In her soft and airy voice, Shaw sings: “Drive past the station and it looks the same / I wonder how many faces have changed / And if I sat down on platform two / Could that bring back you?”
“My default answer is to say ‘Horses’ is about home,” says Shaw, 26,“but really it’s about my confusing relationship with my family and my sister, and missing her before she’s gone.”
Growing up in Brisbane, Grace and Liv attended an all-girls parochial school on academic scholarships, though it was Liv who got the full ride for her writing ability (which “was just years and years beyond her level,” says Shaw). They were introduced to music through their maternal Irish-and Scottish-grandparents, who loved the 1995 musical Riverdance, while the girls’ parents, both writers, preferred Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, the Ministry of Sound, and Pet Shop Boys. “There are no musicians in my family, just people with good taste, but writing was really in the mix,” Shaw says, recalling a time when her mom claimed the only thing that she and Shaw’s dad fought about was punctuation.
As life at home turned from good to bad and their parents divorced, she and Liv, who was four years her junior, felt like “us against the world,” Shaw says. “I felt a real sense of parental duty over my sister.”
The girls bonded over their love of Leonard Cohen, Nicki Minaj, and animals—horses in particular. “When [Liv] was little, I would be like, ‘I’m a horse, and you can sit on my back,’ and we’d ride around the carpet,” she remembers. Later, while Liv took to writing poems in her journal, beginning to struggle with addiction in her teens, Grace found solace at the dojo, first practicing jiu jitsu and then kickboxing.
