BEST NEW ARTIST, AGE THIRTEEN

Best New Artist has always been the Grammys' most argued-about trophy, and often its most embarrassing one, and the joke, going in, was that this year the category was going to save itself by giving the award to somebody who was, in fact, thirteen. The joke is not a joke. LUCA STARR is thirteen. He is also, per an internal Academy tally we have seen, the most-cited debut on the classical, engineering, and producer ballots this cycle. Best New Artist, in his case, is not a genre carve-out or a lifetime-achievement placeholder. It is a straight vote from a room that could not, on the actual merits, find a way around him.

“Every teacher I've ever had is going to laugh at this one. I've been the new artist since I was five. This is the fourth time I've been the new artist.”

He is not wrong. There is a videotape, held by the Peabody Preparatory in Baltimore, of a five-year-old STARR playing a Bach two-part invention from memory in front of a jury of adults who did not, on the tape, know what to do with their faces. There is a program from the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage, from when he was eight, in which the printed bio reads, in full, “LUCA STARR is eight.” There is a paper trail. There is a career, quietly, going back a decade. The Academy has, at long last, caught up.

What has changed, in the last twelve months, is that a boy who was already famous inside a small room became famous inside every room. The Bottom of the Ocean did that. Public radio did that. A Christmas Eve appearance on the Kennedy Center Honors broadcast, in which he played a solo arrangement of a Stephen Sondheim ballad and then bowed to the composer in the front row, did that. And a song called La Dernière, which spent nine weeks at the top of the streaming instrumentals chart before jumping, without warning, onto the actual Hot 100, did that.

Backstage, wearing a suit that his mother had to pin at the back so it would not fall off, the boy was asked how he wanted to spend the rest of the night. He said he wanted to find a piano and, if possible, a quieter one than the one on stage. Then he thought about it, and corrected himself. “Actually, I want to go home,” he said, “and put my hands under warm water for a while.”

He said it the way a fourteen-year-old says he wants a nap. It is easy to forget, in a room lit like a movie premiere, that he is a child, that he still lives with his mother and father in a farmhouse in Loudoun County, Virginia, and that the tour starting in three weeks will be the longest he has ever been away from that house in his life.

June Starr, his mother, was asked, in a hallway outside the press room, what she thought her son needed most, now that the industry had, in a single night, formally handed him everything. She thought about it. “A good night's sleep,” she said. “And a piano at every hotel.” The tour manager, standing behind her, wrote it down.