Recently, Grace VanderWaal, a 15-year-old high-school freshman, was sitting in an upstate New York classroom when a campus tour for prospective students came by. A young woman on the tour spotted VanderWaal, and . . . was not able to keep her cool whatsoever. “This one girl came, and she just was crying and shaking when she saw me,” VanderWaal explains, sitting on a couch after a brief photo shoot in New York City. “She was like, ‘Oh my god, I love you.’”

After VanderWaal won America’s Got Talent in 2016, these sorts of fan interactions became a part of her daily life. The then-12-year-old went viral for performing her own original songs with a ukulele, and immediately drew comparisons to Taylor Swift. (After her win, Swift herself even congratulated VanderWaal with a bouquet of flowers.) Thus began VanderWaal’s decidedly 21st-century trajectory: she has released a full-length album and an E.P., filmed her first leading film role, toured North America in the summer of 2018 as the opener for Imagine Dragons, and accumulated 3 million Instagram followers—all before reaching voting age. She now discusses her time on America’s Got Talent with some remove, a sense of relief that that is in her past. “Some things are a blur, but specific things stand out a lot,” she says. “But it’s crazy—I was so different back then. . . . It feels like I was a toddler.”

Now that she has had some time to digest her quick ascent, VanderWaal seems eager to start to define the next chapter of her career. She will star in next year’s highly anticipated Stargirl adaptation for Disney’s new streaming service, and she plans to release a whole new set of songs this summer—probably in the form of an album, though she’s still figuring it out—that reflect a new “chill” phase of her musical journey. But first she has to finish freshman year.

After winning Talent, VanderWaal wasted no time in releasing her E.P., in December 2016. She was named to scores of “Rising Star”-type lists, and became the youngest-ever person to be included on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Music list. At the end of 2017, she released a full-length album, and spent 2018 touring and filming Stargirl. Through almost all of that, she was homeschooled. “It felt like that’s just what I should do. I have many adult friends, but it was where my only friends were adults—which is strange,” she says. “It’s fine, but it just made me awkward around teenagers, unless they were fans. And I was like, ‘O.K., this isn’t right. I should go back to school.’”

But now she is attempting to manage both—recording and crafting new material while also attending high school in upstate New York. “I really like high school,” she says. “I think I like it too much. Last year, I would miss so many days,” she said. “I was O.K. with it. [But] now, I'll be like, ‘O.K., anything to avoid missing school.’”

She says that school is also giving her material for the new songs, as she is taking a moment to step back from the industry churn, relatively speaking, to reflect on her circumstances in a more “normal” setting. “I’m not really [getting material from] school, but [more from] what comes out of school. You meet people, you meet friends, and it gives me a lot of good material . . . Now I know myself better, and obviously I’ve gotten back in touch with myself. It was almost to a point where I didn’t really know if . . . I don’t know. I was like, Is this me? Or am I being affected by what I’ve been through?”