Carly Mallenbaum

USA TODAY

LOS ANGELES — America's Got Talent champion Grace VanderWaal has plenty of experience singing for millions of TV viewers and playing her ukulele before hundreds of adoring fans. But the 12-year-old songwriting phenom recently got a taste of what it really means to be a recording artist this fall: She worked with a producer on her first EP, Perfectly Imperfect.

"I never really understood how you made a song, because I never really thought about it," the Suffern, N.Y., native, who sang for a three-day sold-out headlining Las Vegas show in October and is performing at Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, says. "But it was really cool to see the process. It was like watching your baby grow."

Since winning the Season 11 grand prize and capturing the hearts and eyeballs of 14.4 million viewers who tuned in for the finale, VanderWaal has brought her folksy-pop style and voice to Columbia Records, which is releasing her first "short album," (as VanderWaal calls it) on Dec. 2. The September episode in which she won the title crown was the NBC talent competition's biggest finale in six years, and marked a whopping 49% jump, of 4.7 million viewers, from 2015,

Fans of AGT will recognize most of the songs, which USA TODAY can exclusively reveal: I Don't Know My Name, Clay, Light The Sky, Beautiful Thing and Gossip Girl, which are on the EP produced by Greg Wells (Idina Menzel, Twenty One Pilots, Katy Perry). The Walmart version of the EP contains additional track Missing You (Coffeehouse Version).

Grace VanderWaal totally freaked out when Jason Mraz called her

Like her live performances, Perfectly Imperfect still features VanderWaal's voice and ukulele-playing prominently, and there are additional instruments and backing vocals mixed in, too.

The singer, who also is credited with composing and writing the lyrics on the EP, says, "It's different. A good different; not a forced different."

These days, VanderWaal's life has been similarly "good different."

Almost two years ago, she spent her birthday money on her first ukulele, was attending public middle school and writing songs about bullies. Today, the seventh grader is enrolled in online classes, working on managing her $1 million prize money, thinking about touring "maybe in a year, and maybe in, like, 15 years" and traveling with her new sweater-wearing pug, Frankenstein. She's also trying to find a place for the dozens of ukuleles that fans send her.

"This isn’t a joke. I’ve become a ukulele hoarder," she says, laughing. "I appreciate it so much, but I wanna say now, please stop sending me ukuleles. I literally don't have room anymore."