Cady Groves

Groves died on May 2, 2020, at the age of 30. Her brother Cody stated that her death was due to unspecified natural causes and that self-harm and foul play were ruled out. It was announced on May 21, 2020, that a five-song EP of her new material titled Bless My Heart would be released digitally on May 29th.

He introduced me to my favorite band and his – Our Lady Peace. When I was 9 he would let me in his room and he'd play shitty covers of our favorite Our Lady Peace song "bring back the sun" on his electric guitar and I would sing. Our lady peace was the song that played at his funeral. The other day I was driving in traffic in LA and all of a sudden my ipod randomly started playing Our Lady Peace "bring back the sun" and I completely lost it. It was his way of making me finally face the fact that he's gone. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I got so mad in that moment. Why him? why me? I have quickly realized that without him in my life- it's like the lights got turned off. So this little ROUGH vocal acoustic demo is tying all of that together... 'MY take on the title "bring back the sun"' I love you brother."

RCA paired Groves with several producers and songwriters (including Savan Kotecha, Carl Falk, and Kristian Lundin) as she began work on her first major-label album. She also collaborated with Stephen Jerzak on "Better Than Better Could Ever Be" and made with Plug in Stereo on "Oh Darling". The song "Oh Darling" spent five weeks on the Billboard Rock Digital Songs Chart and peaked at #36. In 2011, Groves was featured on the single "You and I" by Secondhand Serenade and "All That I Need Is You" by Andrew de Torres. In 2015, a collaboration with Christian Burghardt took place, which led to the track "Whiskey and Wine."

Groves was inspired to follow her dreams after the death of her brother, and she began focusing on her songwriting, initially intending to present her work to other artists to record. But when a session vocalist failed to show up after Groves booked time to record demos of her latest batch of songs, Groves sang them herself with the encouragement of the engineers on the session, and the material grew into Groves' first independent EP, 2009's A Month of Sundays. Another EP, The Life of a Pirate, followed in 2010, and as her social media pages began attracting impressive traffic, several major record labels began bidding for her services. In 2010, Groves signed with RCA, and set out on her first nationwide concert tour, opening a package show that featured Third Eye Blind, Good Charlotte, and All Time Low. Groves eventually left RCA and signed with New York-based independent label Vel Records, where the focus shifted to writing music she was truly passionate about. In May 2015, Groves returned with a new self-released single and video for the song "Crying Game", a dark, personal song inspired by her tumultuous childhood and strained family relationships. Groves released her Vel Records debut EP Dreams for free download in October 2015, which Groves told PopCrush.com "is a testament to the support of her listeners, whose encouragement has been a driving force behind the EP’s development." Dreams has been downloaded over 100,000 times via SoundCloud, and a music video for the title track premiered at FUSE.tv in October 2015, and also saw success at CMT and MTV. Shortly after, Groves embarked on a 30-market High School Nation Tour, where she performed for over 50,000 high school students.

Groves mentioned on multiple occasions that she had a very rough childhood. Groves' brother Casey Groves died on October 23, 2007, at the age of 28. Cady cited his influence as the reason she was able to gain the courage to be a singer-songwriter. Her brother Kelly Groves died on March 23, 2014, also 28 years old. In August 2014, Groves released a song she wrote about Kelly entitled "Bring Back the Sun". She has said this about the song:

Cady Danyl Groves (July 30, 1989 – May 2, 2020) was an American singer and songwriter from Emporia, Kansas. Some of her notable songs include "This Little Girl", "Oh Darlin'", "Forget You", and "Love Actually". She released four EPs during her lifetime: A Month of Sundays (2009), The Life of a Pirate (2010), This Little Girl (2012), and Dreams (2015). Her final effort released during her lifetime, Dreams, was released in October 2015 for free download in honor of her fans.Her fifth EP, Bless My Heart, was released three and a half weeks after her death.

Groves was born on July 30, 1989, to Carol Pettit and Larry Groves and is the youngest of seven. Her full siblings are Kevan Groves, Casey A. Groves, Cody W. Groves, Kyle Groves, Kelly D. Groves, and Kelsy Groves. She also has three more half-siblings, Adam Groves, Courtney Farmwald and Carrie Groves. Growing up in relatively small cities like Marlow, Lawton, Oklahoma, Valley Center, Kansas, and Emporia, Kansas, after her parents divorced, Groves would turn on Christina Aguilera's "Genie In A Bottle" in her room and sing along from the inside of her closet, because she did not want her family members to hear her attempts to match the melismas. One day, when her mother was outside cleaning the family's pool in the backyard, Groves marched outside and declared that she was going to be the next Britney Spears. Groves graduated from high school when she was just 16, and while she was keenly interested in songwriting, her family discouraged her from making music a career, and she instead attended and graduated from Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Scottsdale, Arizona.