meta-scriptGRAMMY Rewind: Harry Styles Wins His First GRAMMY, Takes Home Best Pop Solo Performance For "Watermelon Sugar" | GRAMMY.com
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Harry Styles accepts the GRAMMY for Best Pop Solo Performance at the 63rd GRAMMY Awards.

Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy

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GRAMMY Rewind: Harry Styles Wins His First GRAMMY, Takes Home Best Pop Solo Performance For "Watermelon Sugar"

Relive Harry Styles' win for Best Pop Solo Performance at the 63rd GRAMMY Awards for his hit "Watermelon Sugar"

GRAMMYs/Apr 15, 2022 - 05:27 pm

Missed Harry Styles at the 64th GRAMMY Awards Show? Don’t worry, GRAMMY Rewind has just the thing you need: An episode revisiting the singer/songwriter’s very first GRAMMY win.

Fashionably dressed and as calm as can be, Styles won Best Pop Solo Performance for "Watermelon Sugar" in 2021 at the 63rd Annual GRAMMY Awards. Watch below to see the UK pop star’s gracious acceptance speech.

Along with pushing him to his first GRAMMY win, "Watermelon Sugar" was Styles’ first No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100. The standout track was one of several singles from Styles’ Fine Line, which was nominated for a GRAMMY for Best Pop Vocal Album. Another Fine Line hit, "Adore You," also received a nomination for Best Music Video for that year.

Styles recently announced his Fine Line follow up, titled Harry’s House, which arrives May 20. First, he’ll take the Coachella stage as a headliner April 15 and 22.

Breaking Down The Coachella 2022 Lineup: Headliners Harry Styles, Billie Eilish, Ye Are Just The Beginning Of An Epic, Long-Awaited Return

Amy Allen Press Photo 2024
Amy Allen

Photo: David O’Donohue

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Meet Amy Allen, The Hitmaking Singer/Songwriter Behind Sabrina Carpenter's "Please Please Please" & More Pop Gems

Amy Allen has penned hits for stars like Halsey, Harry Styles, and Tate McRae, including two recent smashes from Sabrina Carpenter. As she embarks on her own artist journey, learn more about the GRAMMY-winner's already dazzling career.

GRAMMYs/Jul 18, 2024 - 06:13 pm

Some artists are lucky enough to have a moment: a song of the summer, a radio hit, or a point at which their song dominates the pop conversation. Before even launching her own singing career, Amy Allen has done just that — multiple times.

In 2022, the Maine native contributed to hit songs from Harry Styles, Lizzo, Charli XCX, and King Princess; at the 2023 GRAMMYs, she was one of the inaugural nominees for Songwriter Of The Year, Non-Classical, and celebrated an Album Of The Year win alongside Styles thanks to her work on Harry's House. And as of press time, two songs she co-wrote with Sabrina Carpenter are in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart: "Espresso" and "Please Please Please," the latter of which hit No. 1.

When you have a resume and catalog as impressive as Allen's, it's hard not to get stuck in a run of highlights — but Allen's writing style is so full of remarkable emotional depth and inevitable hooks that her life and career deserves further exploration. After binging on classic rock and performing in rock and bluegrass bands in her youth, Allen began writing songs for others in the mid 2010s and has only continued to expand her impact on audiences and collaborators alike.

"Amy is a once-in-a-lifetime writer and friend — it all comes to her very naturally and effortlessly," Carpenter recently told Variety. "She's super versatile: She can wear any hat and yet it still feels authentic. I've learned a lot from her and admire what an incredible collaborator she is."

Along the way, Allen has continued honing her skills as an artist in her own right, releasing a handful of EPs and singles since 2015, initially under the name Amy and the Engine. But on Sept. 6, she's ready to fully introduce herself with her debut album — fittingly titled Amy Allen.

Just after Allen celebrated her latest No. 1 and released her newest single, "even forever," GRAMMY.com rounded up the key details you need to know about the singer/songwriter's diverse musical background, from her advocacy for female creators to seeing Harry Styles sing a song she co-wrote to a massive audience.

Her Origin Story Features A Lot Of Car Talk

Allen's early musical growth relied on four-wheeled vehicles to drive the plot forward — in many different forms. Growing up in rural Maine meant long car rides to for school and family outings, which in turn meant a lot of time with the radio.

"My dad is the biggest classic rock fan, so since I was little, I spent hours every day listening to music in the car with him and my sisters," she told Variety earlier this year.

When it came time for one of her sisters to start a band, the elder Allen named it No U-Turn, setting the theme. When the band needed a new bassist, Amy took up the low end at just 8 years old, learning classic songs from the likes of Tom Petty and Rolling Stones. The band started collecting opening spots at a bar in Portland, Maine, and lasted until Allen was in high school and her sisters had left for college. In addition, she started playing in a bluegrass band called Jerks of Grass alongside her high school guitar teacher.

Eventually, Allen thought about moving on and changing course. "I went to nursing school at Boston College for two years, and within a month of getting there I was like, 'I made a big mistake,'" she continued. After moving over to the prestigious Berklee School of Music, Allen started a new project, yet again turning to vehicular terminology: Amy and the Engine, who would go on to open for the likes of Vance Joy and Kacey Musgraves. The project's timeless indie pop charm shone brightly on singles like "Last Forever" and the 2017 EP Get Me Outta Here!, fusing references ranging from the Cranberries to the Cure.

She's A Major Champion For Women In Music

Back in 2021, Allen pondered whether it was time to carve up one of America's most prominent monuments. "Can you imagine tits on Mount Rushmore/ And Ruth Bader Ginsburg from dynamite sticks?" she sang on "A Woman's World," a highlight from her 2021 solo EP AWW!. The song backs off from that explicit ask, but the low-slung waltz of ghostly piano and gentle acoustic guitar still subversively slices at traditional gender roles and power dynamics. 

And while the track may focus its first verse on the Notorious RBG, Allen designed it as a more approachable anthem. "I felt very proud of that song. And it's something that I love to play live, because I think that it's nice as a woman to give that moment to other women in the audience where I see them," she told The Line of Best Fit upon the EP's release.

Her solo work sits in a long line of female pop and rock stars looking to lift others up — with Allen's list of influences including everyone from the Carpenters and Pat Benatar to No Doubt, Hole, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. But she's also aware of the shortcomings in the industry when it comes to behind-the-scenes matters, with female songwriters representing a disproportionately small percentage of the industry and often at lower revenue than their male counterparts. 

"It's important to have more women writing and performing so that younger girls can be hearing that and really connecting with that and resonating with that, and then being inspired to do that themselves," she continued. "I'm really excited to hear what the next generation of singer songwriters creates, and I want to do my part in making sure that they're able to."

She Went Full Circle With Selena Gomez

Allen's emotionally salient and indelibly quirky songwriting with the Engine caught the attention of more than just adoring fans. While on a tour stop in New York, she connected with Scott Harris, a songwriter who has worked with the likes of Shawn Mendes, Camila Cabello, Niall Horan, and Meghan Trainor; when Allen eventually moved to New York, she would take on some of Harris' writing sessions when he was in Los Angeles. One of those sessions spawned the first song she'd place with another artist: Selena Gomez's "Back To You," which ended up on the soundtrack for the second season of Netflix's teen drama "13 Reasons Why" in 2018. 

"I grew up listening to Selena Gomez, and I know that she's going to be a pop icon forever," Allen told People in 2020. "She's awesome. I was so psyched…It definitely propelled my career in the pop writing field further."

Two years later, she would re-team with Gomez for "My Mind & Me," a single released alongside a documentary film of the same title following the impact of the star's diagnoses with lupus and bipolar disorder on her career. The single similarly offers an openhearted, empathetic look at big mental health struggles, this time in the form of a sweeping, cathartic power ballad driven by stumbling syllables and stair-step piano. 

The track was shortlisted for Best Original Song at the 2023 Academy Awards, charted in more than a dozen countries, and, perhaps most importantly, seemed to have made quite the connection with Gomez. "Honestly, it was therapeutic for me," the pop star and actress told Variety in 2022. "I felt super connected to what I was singing and what I was saying."

She Loves Seeing Her Collaborators Live

Songwriters often wind up hidden behind the scenes, unable to really gather the impact that their artistic expression is making on others. But thankfully, Allen has been able to catch a peek in on the arena-sized reactions for some of her biggest collaborators. 

One of Allen's most-played co-writes is "Adore You," a highlight from Harry Styles' 2019 album, Fine Line, which has nearly 1.7 billion streams on Spotify alone as of press time. The buoyant, slippery burst of Fleetwood Mac-indebted funk pop embodies the start of an infatuation, and fans similarly felt under the song's spell. And Allen finally got to see that feeling come to life at Styles' album release show at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles in 2019. 

"Watching Harry, I was really nervous because the album had only been out for a couple days and I wasn't sure if anybody would know that song," Allen told Variety in 2020. She also noted that the song was a hard turn from more heartbroken tracks she'd written for the likes of Halsey. "'Adore You' was my first feel-good song, so I'm psyched about that," she added.

Though not in person, Allen got a similar bolt of joy when she was able to watch Lizzo perform Styles' track for BBC Radio 1 in 2020. "I idolize Lizzo," Allen continued. "It really just goes to show that the right song can be performed by many different people." 

Little did Allen know that she'd get to celebrate a GRAMMY nomination and win alongside Lizzo and Styles, respectively, just three years later. She co-wrote "If You Love Me" from the flute-jamming pop star's 2022 record Special, which was nominated for Album Of The Year at the 2023 GRAMMYs, where Styles' Harry's House (which featured Allen's co-write "Matilda") won the coveted honor.

She Shapeshifts Her Songwriting For Each Artist

When a songwriter has to split their tracks up between multiple different artists, it might be difficult to ensure that each track sounds appropriately fitted to each performer. For Allen, it all comes down to knowing when to follow the rules and when to break them. 

"Sometimes we'll be writing and someone will say, 'It should go straight to the chorus here,' and in my brain I'm like, 'But we need a pre-chorus!' — you know, following the ABCs of songwriting," she told Variety. "But I've really been trying over the last couple of years to deconstruct some of those — that you don't need to pull out all the tricks all the time. It can actually make the song more interesting."

In fact, it might come down to what she prioritizes when sitting down to write, rather than which rules to follow. While walking the red carpet for the 2021 Ivor Novello Awards for songwriting and composition, Allen explained her perspective on songwriting formulas to PRS For Music: "When I'm writing for myself, I usually start with the verse and move my way through, and lots of other times when I'm writing with another artist I make sure the chorus is bulletproof."

The GRAMMYs Are Helping Change Her Family's Perspective On Her Career

Allen earned her first GRAMMY nomination in 2022 for her work on Justin Bieber's Justice, but her most meaningful nomination came a year later for Songwriter Of The Year, Non-Classical at the 65th Annual Awards ceremony (alongside Nija Charles, The-Dream, Laura Veltz, and Tobias Jesso, Jr.). While Allen had a hard time contextualizing the recognition, it helped her loved ones better understand the impact of her career.

"I'm just so grateful…Even my closest family and friends, they're like, 'I've listened to this artist for so long, or I listened to this song on the radio, and I had no idea there was a team that helped make this happen,'" she told VERSED: The ASCAP Podcast in 2022. "People like me growing up in small towns, we don't know that being a songwriter for a career is an option… I watched the GRAMMYs when I was growing up, and if I had known that people were making great careers, I would've gotten on the track a lot earlier."

Though the inaugural award ultimately went to Jesso, Jr., Allen seems to agree that he's deserving of the honor — he's one of her collaborators on her upcoming album.

Maine Will Always Be Home — and An Inspiration

For those who haven't been to Maine, a quick look at Allen's social media will reveal just how stunning the American Northeast can be. Among TikToks promoting her music, Allen almost inevitably drops in a clip displaying the expansive natural beauty of her home state — whether she's on a rope swing over a dazzlingly blue pool of water, or dropping a front spin while skating on the ice, or watching the massive waves from her family home.

"POV: ur back home in maine and wondering why u ever left," she plastered over one particularly stunning TikTok montage of a dazzling day swimming amongst waterfalls. The only thing as beautiful as the scenery is the music behind it is an unreleased track about missing home — proof that Maine will always be part of her, and that she clearly made the correct choice in following her songwriting dreams.

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Megan Thee Stallion at the 2021 GRAMMYs
Megan Thee Stallion at the 2021 GRAMMYs.

Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording Academy

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GRAMMY Rewind: Megan Thee Stallion Went From "Savage" To Speechless After Winning Best New Artist In 2021

Relive the moment Megan Thee Stallion won the coveted Best New Artist honor at the 2021 GRAMMYs, where she took home three golden gramophones thanks in part to her chart-topping smash "Savage."

GRAMMYs/Apr 5, 2024 - 05:25 pm

In 2020, Megan Thee Stallion solidified herself as one of rap's most promising new stars, thanks to her hit single "Savage." Not only was it her first No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100, but the "sassy, moody, nasty" single also helped Megan win three GRAMMYs in 2021.

In this episode of GRAMMY Rewind, revisit the sentimental moment the Houston "Hottie" accepted one of those golden gramophones, for Best New Artist.

"I don't want to cry," Megan Thee Stallion said after a speechless moment at the microphone. Before starting her praises, she gave a round of applause to her fellow nominees in the category, who she called "amazing."

Along with thanking God, she also acknowledged her manager, T. Farris, for "always being with me, being by my side"; her record label, 300 Entertainment, for "always believing in me, sticking by through my craziness"; and her mother, who "always believed I could do it."

Megan Thee Stallion's "Savage" remix with Beyoncé also helped her win Best Rap Song and Best Rap Performance that night — marking the first wins in the category by a female lead rapper.

Press play on the video above to watch Megan Thee Stallion's complete acceptance speech for Best New Artist at the 2021 GRAMMY Awards, and remember to check back to GRAMMY.com for more new episodes of GRAMMY Rewind.

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Beyonce on stage accepting the GRAMMY Award for "Halo" During Her Record-Setting Night In 2010
Beyonce on stage accepting the GRAMMY Award for "Halo" During Her Record-Setting Night In 2010

Photo: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

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GRAMMY Rewind: Watch Beyoncé Win A GRAMMY For "Halo" During Her Record-Setting Night In 2010

As you dive into Beyoncé's new album, 'COWBOY CARTER,' revisit the moment Queen Bey won a GRAMMY for "Halo," one of six golden gramophones she won in 2010.

GRAMMYs/Mar 29, 2024 - 05:05 pm

Amongst Beyoncé's expansive catalog, "Halo" is easily one of her most iconic songs. Today, the 2009 single is her most-streamed song on Spotify; it was her first video to reach one billion views on YouTube; and it helped her set one of her GRAMMY records in 2010.

In this episode of GRAMMY Rewind, watch the superstar take the stage to accept Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for "Halo" in 2010 — the year she became the first female artist to win six GRAMMYs in one night.

"This has been such an amazing night for me, and I'd love to thank the GRAMMYs," she said, admitting she was nervous before taking a deep breath.

Before leaving the stage, Beyoncé took a second to thank two more special groups: "I'd love to thank my family for all of their support, including my husband. I love you. And I'd like to thank all of my fans for their support over the years."

The five other awards Beyoncé took home that night were for the coveted Song Of The Year ("Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)") and four R&B Categories: Best Contemporary R&B Album (I Am... Sasha Fierce), Best R&B Song ("Single Ladies"), Best Female R&B Vocal Performance ("Single Ladies"), and Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance (for her cover of Etta James' "At Last"). 

As of 2024, Beyoncé has won the most GRAMMY Awards in history with 32 wins.

Press play on the video above to relive Queen Bey's "Halo" win for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, and check back to GRAMMY.com for more new episodes of GRAMMY Rewind.

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Linda Ronstadt at the 1977 GRAMMYs
(L-R) Linda Ronstadt and Peter Asher at the 1977 GRAMMYs.

Photo: Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

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GRAMMY Rewind: Watch Linda Ronstadt's Sweet & Simple Acceptance Speech In 1977

When Linda Ronstadt won a GRAMMY for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance — for her seventh album, 'Hasten Down the Wind' — she only had one special person in mind: her producer, Peter Asher.

GRAMMYs/Mar 22, 2024 - 04:32 pm

With Hasten Down the Wind, Linda Ronstadt became the first female artist with three million-selling albums in a row — and furthered her legacy as one of the pioneers of women in rock music.

The album also helped Ronstadt snag her second GRAMMY, as it won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1977. (The year prior, she took home Best Female Country Vocal Performance for her cover of Hank Williams' "I Can't Help It (If I'm Still in Love With You).")

In this episode of GRAMMY Rewind, relive the moment Linda Ronstadt won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for Hasten Down the Wind in 1977.

Ronstadt kept her acceptance speech short and sweet: "I'd especially like to thank Peter Asher," the producer of the pop rock LP. "Thank you," she added with a smile.

To date, Ronstadt has won 11 GRAMMYs and received 27 nominations. In 2011 and 2016, respectively, she received a Latin GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award and a GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award.

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