By Kerry Justich, Yahoo | Meghan Trainor was just 19 years old when she found mainstream success with her hit song, “All About That Bass.” Now, as a 28-year-old wife and mother, the pop star says she’s finally practicing the self-love that she preached about in the 2014 hit.
“I wrote those songs almost in a… not a joke, but in a way like, ‘Well, no one’s gonna hear this,’ like, ‘No one’s gonna cut this song,’ ‘This will never play on the radio,’ like laughing, giggling, while writing ‘All About That Bass,'” she tells Yahoo Life. “Literally I went to work that day and thought, like, ‘well, no one’s gonna hear this song.’ But it just showed that the world was ready.”
While the bop wasn’t Trainor’s first success as a songwriter, it put her on the map as a singer and performer in her own right — something that she thought she’d never accomplish merely because of her looks.
“Growing up in the ’90s and 2000s, there were a lot of beautiful pop stars that were all ‘skinty,’ you know, like, very small. So that for sure crushed my dreams when I was in high school, and I was like, ‘Well, I don’t look like those pop stars do so I guess I’ll be a songwriter, and I’ll be behind the scenes,'” she recalls.
As it turns out, singing about not being a size two “silicone Barbie doll” ended up being what set her apart and brought her recognition.
“Luckily, everything worked out. But I really tried to push my whole career in one direction because of that, which makes me sad now,” she explains. “Being different does work and can help and then I noticed that that song saved a lot of people’s mentality.”
The song was praised for its positive message about body image before those kinds of candid conversations happened in mainstream media. And while it impacted and uplifted listeners who felt validated by Trainor’s lyrics, the lyricist herself needed that same inspiration.
“There was a lot of bad self-talk in my household,” she says of her childhood. “My mom is very hard on herself and my dad is like a jokester, but not in a good way. If he’s trying to give you advice on something, he’ll kind of pick on you and that’s his way of like, helping you. But it’s traumatic. I took him to therapy back in the day so he knows.”
She recalls a specific instance where her dad would question something she was wearing, saying, “You’re not going to wear those pants, right? You look fat.” She says that he had no intention of hurting her with his words, “but he didn’t know that as a young teen girl, I’m gonna remember that for the rest of my life. … I’m trying to rewire my brain so that my future daughter and son don’t think like that as well.”
Trainor learned just how much words really mean from those experiences and made sure to be mindful with her own. As she met fans who felt their lives were changed by her songs, she connected to those sentiments.
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https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/meghan-trainor-relearning-body-positivity-after-giving-birth-192722556.html
Meghan Trainor Says Relearning Body Positivity After Giving Birth Was ‘the hardest thing I ever had to do’
