When the young songwriter Wallice plays the Sinclair Sunday, her show will likely end with a song about her own funeral. Both the song and the funeral will involve a lot of dancing and rocking. And it’s something she plans to carry out, some day in the very distant future.
“I love that idea of a casket in a muscle car,” she said this week. “I think ‘Funeral’ is the best song I’ve made, I wrote it because the whole idea of funerals is about people dressed in black being very somber, and I want mine to be fun. And here’s a spoiler alert: That’s the last song in the show and the room gets so energetic, it sounds like it was written to be the closer of a concert.”
Of all the pop artists to emerge online during shutdown, Wallice (full name, Wallice Hana Watanabe) is one of the more original, with a sharp lyrical wit and a jazz-informed flair for melody. Now 25, she has been in some corner of show business for most of her life, appearing on the Christmas episode of TV’s “Frasier” when she was four. “That was my first job and I just have vague memories of being on the set. My mom used to be an actress and when I told her I was interested in it he said ‘May as well try’.” She later studied jazz at the New School in New York but left after a year.
“I wanted to study jazz because it’s super technical and all the jazz musicians I know are well versed in music theory. You can maybe hear that in some of the chordal qualities I have, and just barely in my style of singing. But what really made me want to sing was hearing Lana Del Rey’s ‘Video Games’ when I was 14, and then discovering Radiohead. It made me want to make music that would get people feeling the way that I did.”
Many of the people she’s encountered in New York and L.A. have turned up in her songs. The song “90s American Superstar” includes the putdown line “Stop being so dramatic, you just got dropped from Atlantic”– a line that should resonate with a few Boston bands who were on that record label. “I do know someone who was dropped from Atlantic, so maybe I was thinking of that subconsciously. But that song really came about when my producer and I went to my grandparents’ house to record. Every night we’d open their drawer of DVD’s — There was ‘Point Break’ and “Dude, Where’s My Car?’ So we’d watch those ‘90s films and try to see how many song titles we could come up with.”
She’s played Boston before as support to Jawni, but the current tour is her first as a headliner. “When I started the tour the suits, as I told them, said it would be cheaper to tour with just me and one other band member, but I didn’t listen– I need a four piece band for that full rock band vibe. That comes from my jazz background; I want to be sure it[s minimal backing tracks and everything sounds like it’s played live. We still need tracks for some things like backing vocals but never the lead; I’m picky about that. I need to feel like it’s really a rock show.”