beabadoobee

Episode Overview

• Beabadoobee discusses the introspective and mature themes of her new album, exploring personal growth, self-accountability, and navigating her emotions.
• She delves into her songwriting process, from stripping songs down to their acoustic core to using music as a form of therapy to process complex feelings like insecurity and heartbreak.
• The conversation covers her journey with fame, the complexities of confidence, and her experiences with sexism as a woman in the music industry.
• Rick Rubin and Beabadoobee listen to several tracks from the new record, with Beabadoobee providing background on the inspiration and emotional origins of each song.

Key Concepts

• Introspection and Personal Growth: The album's central theme is self-reflection, moving from blaming others to understanding her own role in situations, which she attributes to maturing.
• Songwriting as Therapy: Music is a primary tool for processing difficult emotions. She writes about her insecurities and personal struggles, and later listens to her own songs to understand and reflect on her feelings.
• Creative Process and Authenticity: The discussion covers her methods, including building complex melodies over simple chords, creating composite narratives from friends' stories, and writing raw, moment-for-moment accounts of her experiences. This is complemented by a desire for authenticity, reflected in her choice of a candid album cover.
• Insecurity and Comparison: A recurring topic is the feeling of comparing oneself to others, particularly online, and the journey toward self-acceptance and realizing one's own worth.
• Navigating Fame and Identity: Beabadoobee reflects on managing the pressures of her career by staying grounded, feeling more like herself now than ever before, and understanding that confidence can coexist with self-doubt.
• Female Anthem and Industry Sexism: She consciously creates music to empower women, drawing inspiration from personal frustrations with sexism she's encountered in the music industry.

Quotes

• At 0:39 - "It's the first time I'm actually like acknowledging situations that have happened to me but through my own eyes instead of like blaming others constantly, and I think that's a lot to do with maturing and growing up." - Beabadoobee explains the meaning behind calling her album "introspective."
• At 1:45 - "You know a song is good when it's good completely naked, and it's just me and an acoustic guitar." - Beabadoobee on the power of a song's fundamental structure, reinforcing the value of their acoustic sessions.
• At 2:34 - "It feels like you're about to really spill your guts... like, I mean it." - Rick Rubin's interpretation of the album cover's raw, emotional feel.
• At 25:12 - "Oh, I feel way more myself now." - In response to Rick Rubin's question about whether she felt more authentic at 15 or now, she confirms she feels much more like herself in the present.
• At 25:41 - "It's the happiest I've been in a long time. And that's ironic because a lot of things have happened to me the past year." - She describes her current emotional state, noting that processing difficult feelings has ultimately helped her find happiness.
• At 26:26 - "I'm always gonna not feel confident, hate myself sometimes... but I don't think that makes me less confident." - Speaking on the misconception that she is always confident, she explains that confidence is complex and coexists with moments of self-doubt.
• At 27:34 - "I feel like I've completed this record. Whatever happens next, it's out of my hands." - beabadoobee expresses her sense of peace and accomplishment after finishing her album, feeling that the creative work is done.
• At 32:16 - "It's me acknowledging what I do in relationships... I tend to find comfort in chaotic things." - She explains that the lyrics of "Take A Bite" are about her self-awareness of a tendency to create drama in relationships.
• At 55:38 - "I just wanted like a female anthem, like a girl anthem." - Beabadoobee on her initial goal for the song "Talk."
• At 56:32 - "The Uber driver... always assumes I am never the lead singer or the guitarist." - Beabadoobee on the real-life experiences of sexism that inspired the lyrics about not being "part of the band."
• At 57:50 - "It's crazy like what three chords can do... You can write any melody on it." - Beabadoobee reflecting on the songwriting craft after demonstrating how she wrote different sections of "Talk" over the same simple chords.
• At 1:02:51 - "This encapsulates the reason why I am the way I am." - Beabadoobee on how "Tie My Shoes" reflects the way her childhood shaped her adult personality and fears.
• At 87:55 - "that past week I had been comparing myself with so much girls on the internet and absolutely hating the way I looked." - beabadoobee explaining the personal insecurity and self-doubt that inspired the song "Cruel Affair."
• At 88:13 - "She's a catch, but so am I. Like, we're both... we're like, everyone has the same problems." - beabadoobee on the empowering realization in "Cruel Affair," acknowledging that self-worth and insecurities are a shared human experience.
• At 88:38 - "Do you ever talk about it with your girlfriends?" "Oh, all the time." - Rick Rubin asks if she discusses these feelings of comparison, and beabadoobee confirms it's a frequent topic.
• At 94:38 - "It's a mashup of all the experiences I had from my friends and the experiences I had about breakups... I wanted to encapsulate all of everything that I've learned, everything I've heard into this one song." - beabadoobee explaining that the song "Post" is a composite story.
• At 101:27 - "It's like I need reminding... Like especially with 'Take a Goodbye'... me and Jake, like, get in a thing where I'm like, 'Oh my god, I feel like I'm spiraling again,' and we listen to 'Take a Goodbye' and we're like, 'Oh, there you go. That's why you're spiraling.'" - beabadoobee on how she uses her own music as a tool for self-reflection.
• At 101:52 - "[This song] takes me back to that hotel room... it was word for word everything I did and everything I felt in that exact moment." - beabadoobee describing how the song "How It Went" is a direct and visceral snapshot of a specific, raw experience.
• At 102:35 - "I'd never made a record out of London before... this was a new world for me and I was basically shitting myself." - beabadoobee explaining that the song "Malibu" is about her nervousness and anxiety about leaving her comfort zone.
• At 103:26 - "Don't wait for the tide just to dip both your feet in." - beabadoobee quoting a favorite lyric from "Malibu," which encapsulates the theme of fully committing to an opportunity.

Takeaways

• Practice introspection to shift from a mindset of blame to one of personal accountability and growth.
• Test the strength of your creative ideas by stripping them down to their most basic form, like a song with just an acoustic guitar.
• Embrace candid, unposed moments to capture genuine emotion and authenticity in your work.
• Surround yourself with trusted people to stay grounded when navigating external pressures or fame.
• Accept that true confidence is not the absence of self-doubt, but the ability to move forward despite it.
• Acknowledge your own self-destructive or chaotic tendencies as the first step toward understanding and changing them.
• Channel personal frustrations and negative experiences into creative expression to make powerful statements.
• Recognize that simple creative foundations can be the starting point for a wide range of complex and varied ideas.
• Use your own creative work as a tool for self-reflection to understand your past emotional states and track your personal growth.
• Counteract feelings of comparison by openly discussing them and remembering that insecurity is a widely shared human experience.
• Transform painful personal moments into art as a powerful act of healing and transformation.
• Commit fully to new opportunities and challenges rather than approaching them with hesitation.