Grace grew up in Australia and even though she's spent much of the last year in Atlanta working on music, she still isn't completely adjusted to American cuisine. "In Australia it's hot so we eat more salads and fresher stuff as opposed to comfort food, plus the portions here are crazy different," the blonde 18-year-old singer says with a laugh. "We went to the movies the other day and I ordered a medium Diet Coke and it was enormous! I was like, 'How big is a large?' I'm still getting used to that but it's good, I'm not complaining."

In true Australian fashion, Grace orders a breezy chicken salad in a hip cafe in Soho that's playing the Pixies while we opt for the Eggs Benedict with crabmeat. However there's nothing predicable about Grace's stratospheric rise in the music industry. It stems from her reimagination of the Lesley Gore classic "You Don't Own Me" which was produced by Quincy Jones, features G-Eazy and quickly garnered over a million plays on Soundcloud. But how exactly did she find herself in the position to be working with one of music's biggest legends on a standout track?

"My manager has been close friends with Quincy Jones for a long time and one day they were hanging out at his house talking about me covering one of his classics and 'You Don't Own Me" just popped into Qunicy's head." Grace adds that she was 17 at the time—the same age as Gore was when she recorded the song which helped launch the feminist movement—however the cover was on the back burner until Gore died last February. "When she sadly passed away Quincy send an email saying we had to get it out as a tribute to her and within a week it had been released." That said, no one could have gauged the reaction it would get.

"When you are making music you don't really think about what will happen, I just wanted to do a good job because obviously it's Quincy fucking Jones," Grace says with a laugh. She also stresses that Jones (the man behind the career of so many legends including Michael Jackson) was very hands-on when it came to the arrangement of the song and making sure that all of the iconic elements from the original version were represented in this updated rendition. "It all kind of fell into place really perfectly and it happened so fast in a way I never expected," she continues, sounding as if she can't even believe it herself. "It went to number one in Australia the other day and I did not expect that at all. It's crazy."

What's even crazier is the story behind meeting Jones for the first time last year. "We were in Atlanta and his manager called us and said we should stop by the fundraising event for Morehouse College so I'm in jeans and sneakers and we walk up to the house and everyone is in cocktail dresses and we looked like the biggest misfits and I was so embarrassed because of that," she recounts. "But he was cool, he's so nice and down to earth and when he starts telling you stories you're just in awe," she continues, adding that his house is covered with Grammys and Platinum plaques as well as a signed copy of the 1985 charity single "We Are The World."

As you may have expected Grace is hoping to have her release up on that wall someday as well and correspondingly she is currently hard at work on a full-length album which she hopes to have out this fall. "I think the EP was really young and fun because I made it when I was 16 and I'm dealing with stuff like having a crush on someone and making all of the mistakes you do when you're growing up," she says of her previous material. "I think since I'm a little older now the album may be a little more mature and grown-up. I want the album to be a classic, it's going to have more of a serious tone but it'll still have fun elements."

Speaking of the classics, while most of today's pop stars view Britney Spears as old-school, Grace has always been influenced by the Motown and R&B acts that her mother played around the house growing up like Gladys Knight and Smokey Robinson in addition to more current artists like Lauryn Hill and Amy Winehouse. "I love music where it's at today but I think I'm more inspired by the past, specifically the nineties." That dichotomy between the past and present lies at the core of Grace's sound—and like her ever increasing legion of fans, we can't wait to see where she goes from here.