Grace & Moji's debut Single 'Our Love': "The Resilience of Unconditional Love in Modern Times".

Updated: Jul 23, 2023

In today's world, the concept of romantic love has become faded, worn out, constantly challenged, and questioned. We face increasing difficulties in establishing meaningful connections with one another as human beings, and it seems that our differences far outweigh what unites us. Even the younger generations are opting for lifestyles where romantic love takes a backseat to materialistic elements, completely excluding it from the equation of personal development.

Grace & Moji, a talented couple of musicians/producers based in Los Angeles, California, present us with a different perspective on love itself through their latest release titled "Our Love." In this song, they immerse us in the nostalgia of how romantic and passionate love still has a place in modern times, sharing an intimate part of their relationship with listeners through their music.

About Grace & Moji:

Los Angeles-based artist/producer duo Grace Hong and Martin Wave, known as Grace & Moji, debut their collaboration in which they explore love, creative expression, and healing in their relationship.

Grace, a native New Yorker raised in a broken home by Korean immigrants, began studying classical piano and voice at a young age. With a career spanning international development, Wall Street, and corporate leadership, she left it all behind in search of happiness and purpose as an artist. In 2021, she launched her solo project as Nolo Grace, releasing the debut single "Wake Up" featuring Sean Kingston.

Today, Grace's multifaceted career encompasses business consulting in private equity, co-founding the creative community PARASOL, and serving on the Board of Directors of the nonprofit Save the Music.

Martin, an award-winning, platinum-selling music producer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist, hails from the forests of Sweden. With a passion for music production from an early age, he relocated to Los Angeles in 2018. His extensive repertoire includes hundreds of millions of streams, collaborations with notable artists, and compositions for films, video games, and global brand campaigns. Martin's ability to evoke emotions and create immersive experiences shines through his blend of cinematic soundscapes, beats, and introspective lyrics that explore personal transformation and a sense of belonging.

About the Release:

“Our Love” is the debut single from Grace & Moji’s forthcoming album. The song is an ode to the unbreakable bond they share, and how the complexities of their relationship have inspired them to create music together.

What sets Grace & Moji apart is their genuine desire to channel their life experiences into their art. They have poured their hearts into this project, “Our Love” is not just a song, but a culmination of their journey and struggles. It is through this creative outlet that Grace & Moji share their stories, truths, and quirky personalities with the world.

“ ‘Our Love’ is the last song on our EP. The other songs on the EP are about working through the struggles in our marriage, and ‘Our Love’ is an anthem about our relationship, about arriving in a better place through the struggles. It seemed fitting to start with that as our first release. We were inspired to make a music video that juxtaposes the idealized aspects of love with the realities of making it work day to day.”

- Grace Hong

In-Depth Analysis:

"Our Love" explores the deep and powerful connection between two individuals who feel intense and passionate love. Through its lyrics, it delves into the idea that true love can transform lives and bring a sense of fulfillment and joy worth being patient for.

The song begins in an interesting manner with a melancholic piano melody accompanied by filtering effects that give it a nostalgic tone. This melody is short and it’s interrupted by the entry of an incredible harmony of voices and violins, creating a progressive increase in volume that is abruptly cut off, signaling the start of the song.

Although this initial melody is in the same scale as the song, it doesn't have a direct correlation with it until later on. It serves as an introduction, aiming to evoke an immersive sensation that transports us to nostalgia and memories. It's as if the artists wanted to prepare us in advance for what's to come, immediately capturing the listener's attention.

It's interesting to analyze this initial section of the song alongside its music video, as we can confirm the sense of nostalgia through a series of images depicting past joy moments of the couple, all with a VHS aesthetic that reinforces that feeling of happy memories. In this way, the video showcases the journey that led them to compose this incredible anthem and what Grace and Moji have achieved as a couple up to this day.

After this introduction, the song begins with a well-defined acoustic guitar sound, marking the initial chords with the voices of Grace & Moji harmonizing together. Now we start delving into the story.

It's noteworthy that the song immediately starts with vocal harmonies, where Moji sings the lead vocals while Grace accompanies by singing the same phrase an octave higher: "Forever seems too short, a time to spend with you. You came right in and swept aside everything I knew," creating a significant impact in the listener right from the start.

The song puts forth the idea of how valuable the time spent with our loved one is, and how love can generate drastic changes in our lives when we give it space to grow.

The choice of vocal harmony in octaves helps develop this idea in depth and reflects the incredible complicity between the two singers. Musically speaking, harmonizing in octaves implicates interpreting the same melodic line but in different nuances. This demonstrates the symbiosis and affinity that exist within the couple, even beyond the musical realm.

The song continues into the first verse, gradually adding some piano and electric guitar arrangements, which accompany the vocal performance throughout the entire song and help create the atmosphere of what the singers feel in their relationship.

The gradual inclusion of these instruments helps the listener dive deeper into the story. Moreover, the choice of effects for these instruments is sublime, as each one of them is a key piece that adds more elements to create a vivid soundscape. The presence of delay effects on the electric guitar adds an aesthetic detail to the instrumental part, helping create that sense of a "utopian reality."

This sensation is reinforced by additional backing vocals that enter at the beginning of the first chorus, positioning themselves behind the main vocals and providing angelic-like harmonies to the song reflecting an incredible celestial atmosphere.

In the second verse, we encounter Grace's voice singing the main vocals alone, which is a very interesting musical device, as it gives the impression that we are now hearing the love story from Grace's perspective. In the phrase, "This love will break us down, so we can come back whole. You made it safe to feel my pain, was locked up on my own," Grace suggests that although the love they share will break their emotional barriers, even when vulnerable, they can still feel that their love is a safe place.

Grace and Moji's voices come together again at the end of this second verse to sing the chorus once more, this time accompanied by percussion and a variety of string and violin arrangements similar to what we heard at the beginning of the song, providing a cohesive and emotive ending.

"Our Love" is a musical composition that stands out not only for its emotionality and vivid depiction of the deep connection between two people in love but also as a testament to the transformative power of love and its ability to change things within us and everything around us, even in times when true love seems like a thing of the past.

This song marks the birth of an incredible musical project that unites these two talented performers and songwriters, who will undoubtedly bring forth a myriad of songs that will make us reflect and visualize intense experiences in a vivid manner and from a different perspective.