Meghan Trainor Has Found Herself

“It’s been so weird,” Meghan Trainor confesses partway into a conversation about life, music, creativity and one’s place in the fame-o-sphere. “I’ve been told now is a bad time to be a pop star with a happy, up-tempo song …”

She stops, knowing the irony of all artists being beaten to deliver just that: a happy, up-tempo, positive song, preferably one where people end up together for the night — or forever. Most artists spend their entire careers loathing that phrase and its implications for their music, and now the perky Nantucket-born songstress has found herself being thwarted by the very thing Top 40 radio supposedly runs on.

“I get so in my head, I play my songs for strangers on the street … It’s that thing: They tell you, ‘Don’t be you, but you know, be you.’ What does that mean? 

“I talk to Nicki Minaj or will.i.am, tell them about it, and they’re like, ‘Do you like it?’ And I say, ‘Yeah,’ and they’re like, ‘Well, that’s it.’ Boom!”

Trainor has a right to be running this train of thought. Sure, “All About That Bass,” her breakout single, was the 4th most played song of 2014, selling upwards of 11 million copies globally by the end of the year as it hit No. 1 in 58 countries and spent a whopping eight weeks at No. 1 in the United States.

That alone is pretty big doings. But when Title, the EP, converted to Title, the full record, it promptly debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top 200. “Lips Are Moving,” the saucy kiss-off follow-up single, peaked at No. 4, making Trainor the rare female artist who follows a debut single topping the charts with a second Top 5 single.

Boom, indeed. 

The girl who released three DIY records before turning 17 was always determined, always intentional about how she chased the craziest dream of all. Against impossible odds, she turned down a full scholarship to the Berklee College of Music for a publishing deal with Nashville’s fierce indie Big Yellow Dog Music, after being referred by former NRBQ guitarist and later hit songwriter Al Anderson. For the multi-instrumental girl (piano, guitar, trumpet, bongos), she wanted to be out there chasing her dream.

Never mind that the already curvaceous blonde who hadn’t yet completed high school was already too old for Disney and too chunky for the Hooters girl/Victoria Secret model/Barbie type that female recording artists seem to embody. Trainor knew she could make music, write and craft hits – and have fun doing it. She was good to go.

In 2013, Carla Wallace introduced Trainor to Kevin Kadish, an equally aspiring creative person. The two did what writer/producer/programmers do — they locked themselves in a room, tossed ideas back and forth and made each other laugh. One of the songs they conjured was “Bass,” but even then they joked about it. Trainor remembers, “When we had the song for nine months, people were like ‘Adele is really confident, you should get it to her …’ and ‘Beyonce is really confident with her curves …’ So, OK, how do you get it to someone on their team?”

Every writer with a deep groove, a killer hook and a melody that moves asks the same question. Though a teen, Trainor realized the reality, especially because those women largely write their own songs.

And “Bass” wasn’t something she thought would break her wide open. Laughing now, she says, “Not at all! No one thinks like that. It’s not, ‘My first song will be about my body.’ We laughed when we wrote it, thinking, ‘No one will ever cut it. Because no one’ll ever sing those lines.’”

Ironically, the record is the mastered demo.

Never say never. Ever. 

Trainor is the goddess of irrepressible spirit and the will to own who you are, to embrace your strengths and drop the shit that weighs you down. Not that she’s not willing to work – or fight – for it. And she brings a Sundrop kind of spirit along with her, sweeping people up in her happy-go-lucky glow.

People tend to root for the quirky, happy girl with the Mary Tyler Moore/Zooey Deschanel/Reese Witherspoon/Parker Posey exuberance, the retro-fitted pop music and the wide-open embrace of the moment. If her candy-colored ’50s musical video for the body positivity anthem is the diving board, it’s obvious Trainor takes the target point for slagging and turns up the volume on self-acceptance.

The hook a double entendre, the verses pretty frank about the benefits of a woman in full, the perky modern vintage ’50s/’60s retro pop worked massively. 

By the time she won the 2016 Best New Artist Grammy, she’d been everywhere. Beyond “Lips Are Moving,” she’d toured, dropped “Dear Future Husband” and tried to keep up with the momentum of having that kind of tsunami hit. But records that big also come with burn.

As Grammy producer Ken Ehrlich says of the woman he booked to perform on the 2016 telecast, “I remember I kept hearing about the song, long before I heard it … and then when the song hit, you couldn’t escape it. I know, too, I liked her. She’s a good person, and I wanted to put her on the show. But (by 2016) ‘All About That Bass’ was way over, so it was hard to do.

“She had big nominations the year before for Record of the Year and Song of the Year, so we’re talking a significant talent. She’s someone who can deal with a ballad and a tempo song equally well – which isn’t easy for everyone. So, Lionel Richie was (MusiCares) Person of the Year, and I thought she’d be terrific for that tribute because she has the versatility. Plus, it honors her as a writer and performer because she’s honoring one of the all-time great artists and performers.”

So unbridled is her enthusiasm for life, as well as pop music, Ehrlich thought of the effervescent then-redhead immediately for his summer “Greatest Hits” series. Knowing he needed to team someone with the Backstreet Boys, he thought she’d be fun. It was gold.

 “My impression: She totally forgot she was a pop star; she was a fan the entire time,” Ehrlich remembers. “She kept saying, ‘I never in my life thought I’d ever be on stage with the Backstreet Boys. And here I am.’ But she could also keep up with them vocally. That’s a big piece of it.”

That pop thing. For all the hits she’s written, songs for Jennifer Lopez (“Ain’t Your Mama”), Jason Derulo (“Painkiller”), Disney star Sabrina Carpenter (“Can’t Blame A Girl For Trying”), Rascal Flatts (“I Like The Sound of That”), Jason Mraz (“More Than Friends”) and Macy Gray (“Sugar Daddy”) among many, it’s a tough thing to shake that cloying stench of “wheeeeeee!” 

Beyond even a guilty pleasure, there’s that notion of confectionary awesomeness that gets written down, cast off, or sniggered at. It can even be cringe-inducing. 

Trying to get secondary sources for this piece was nearly impossible. 

Go-to contextualizers from the world of pop-leaning music critics, other artists, a few well-placed television bookers, fellow songwriters – especially women – were resolved in their refusal to talk about Trainor. One, an Oscar-nominated friend actually said tersely, “She just doesn’t interest me.”

Brandy Clark, a six-time Grammy – including 2015 Best New Artist – nominee, gets the rub.  “That was my earworm song the year it came out. And the one thing Meghan did that nobody else was – she shined a light on full-figured women in a way that was really fun. It was so cool this young beautiful girl was saying, ‘I’m not a size 6 and I’m not gonna be apologizing or feeling bad.’

“She always had that throwback thing, but it also feels really fresh and new the way she did it. Flirty, not funny really, but sexy flirty. With her voice and the lyrical approach of ‘I’m bringing booty back,’ there was a lot going on.”

For the business people, there’s a sense of bad blood over those who were handling her. Troy Carter, her uber-manager was in the midst of moving to Spotify. Still, there’s talk of man-handling, lots of pressuring and refusing to listen to parameters. Some could say it was people doing their jobs, but sometimes what the artists don’t know can hurt them. The artist and critics, though, seem to take umbrage at the combination of pure pop, the retro doo-wop undertow and the notion – seemingly – that Trainor’s happy being a happy girl.

It wasn’t always that way. Certainly with the massive success came challenges most artists never have to face. For Trainor, who hit the Jingle Ball circuit of radio shows, TV appearances and global touring, there was wear and tear. But as Ehrlich notes, “I love artists who are always up for a challenge, and that’s Meghan.” 

Collaborations abounded at this point, too. There was the the man-on-woman doowop-undertowed “Marvin Gaye” with Charlie Puth and the even more massive, almost torch ballad “Like I’m Gonna Lose You” with John Legend that was ubiquitous. 

Trainor just kept working. 

“People told me in the beginning, ‘If you’re hot, take everything, because it won’t be like that forever,’” she recalls. “Then when it slows down, you wonder, ‘Did I do something wrong?’ It takes a lot to do this: physical health, mental health, sleep. I was in Japan all alone with a sinus infection, and all I wanted to do was call my Mom.”

Inevitably, the pace took its toll. Two surgeries, tours cancelled. All that momentum coming to a crashing halt. It’s a double reminder: take care of yourself or it can all collapse. But also, be in the moment, because when it stalls, it can grind to a halt.

 Compounding her problem was the chaos around public perception of her disappearance. Some of that perceived disappearance was on the suggestion of her business advisors, who likely had good intentions. But in a world of fearing making a mistake, sometimes doing nothing is a mistake.

“I had to have my second vocal surgery so I couldn’t go to the Grammys the year after I won my Grammy,” Trainor explains. “I should have been presenting, I should have been there. My team was like, ‘It’s OK.’ I’m asking, ‘Shouldn’t I say something? You know, about why I’m not there?’ I was told, ‘I don’t think it matters or people care.’ So I didn’t, and it was awful …

“People didn’t know, and I looked like I’d just disappeared – or didn’t care.”

The distress in her voice is palpable. Just as you can hear the imagined pain in that last big chorus of “Gonna Lose You” that provides the hook’s authenticity, it colors her speaking voice now. And she owns the toll it all took on her.

“That was my dark phase; the anxiety physically rattled my body,” she admits. “I had fevers, aches; I was internalizing all of it. It was a forced break. I hadn’t taken a break, well, it was full-on from Day One.

“Music is 100 percent therapy.

If Trainor’s musical transformation isn’t so literal, there is a strong sense that her already long amounts of fempowerment took an even more pivotal place in her creativity. It shaped how she portrayed herself and attacked the world. The business side of that impacted what she was able to make of her career and make that aspect matter. If she’d collaborated with everyone from Yo Gotti, Lunchmoney Lewis and her own mother on Thank You, she ramped up the diversity on Treat Myself – and she also got more focused on getting what she wants as an artist.

“I took a long break, not by choice,” she recalls, “but then we’d have the album ready, and they’d say, ‘Well, there’s a lot of traffic. We hear Bieber’s coming …’ or ‘There’s a new Taylor [Swift], and the radio promised to play it …’

“And all I would think is, ‘What? Is this a competition?’ I don’t want [music] to be that ever. This is music, something that’s supposed to make you feel — hopefully  —  good, but all the things. And I know emotions aren’t a competition.”

Treat Myself kept moving. Originally slated for 2018, then 2019, it finally dropped earlier this year. On one level, it allowed for collabs like “Genetics” with the Pussycat Dolls and “Nice To Meet Ya” with Nicki Minaj, as well as the old school Paisley Park-feeling “Funk,” the space jam reminder to self “Babygirl” and the darker, self-doubters encouragement “Workin’ On It” with Lennon Stella and Sasha Sloan.

Laughing again, she admits being consumed by music and the will to make music. “The whole time I was working — ‘The Voice’ in the UK, pop-ups, random gigs, ‘Just Got Paid’ — in part to make money and pay the bills, but also I wrote and made music the whole time because it helps, heals.

“A lot of the ‘have they forgotten me? … is she still trying?’ doubts can get pretty loud. I know it sounds crazy, but people want to write you off. People keep saying, ‘There’s all this traffic, that everything’s moody, hip hop is ruling the world’,” she continues softly, still feeling the sting. “People were like, ‘How are you going to save pop music?’

“I mean, this third album was all disco, pop music, all Abba and ’80s pop. What’s Dua Lipa doing? Lizzo? That’s pop music.”

There’s a laugh, a little street, a little snark. Nobody’s fool, Trainor took matters into her own hands. Asking her management to approach Minaj for a feature, she was cautioned, “‘If she doesn’t like it, she’s not going to do it.’ As a songwriter, she impresses me so much, her bounce and the rhythms she had. 

“Her lyrics are very impressive; she rhymes shit I wouldn’t think of. Her older stuff – ‘The Boom Boom Bass,’ ‘Starship’ – was my high school jam. She showed me first we can have a party, and we can still write cool songs about all of it.”

Minaj heard “Nice To Meet Ya” and not only signed on for a throwdown rap verse, she appears as Trainor’s Fairy BossBitch Godmother in the video. “To me, it was such an accomplishment to have her listen, just listen to the song. But spending time with her doing the video, talking about all of it, it was awesome. She wrote the best verse, and she made everything that song was real.”

At this point in her career, the girl raised in a seaside resort town understands the realities of the game. Joking when she grew up in Nantucket, she didn’t even own a bathing suit, she has her own ability to find the lemonade stand. 

When she heard rumors the Pussycat Dolls might be reuniting, she called her friend Nicole Scherzinger to ask.

“I had this song ‘Genetics,’ and I thought, ‘How cool would it be?’,” she explains. “So I finally asked her if the rumors are true. I was a little bit, ‘In what world are these dancers gonna sing with me?’ But you ask, and then …”

Admitting putting it out there for rejection is tough – though she tells a hilarious story about going to Roc Nation for a meeting where she was rejected for having Beyonce join a track, only to have her drop a secret album the next week – but Trainor perseveres.

“I’ve had people say, ‘Keep writing because it makes [the songs] better,’ and I’m like, ‘No! It’s soul-crushing and it fucks with people’s heads.’ In my head, my songwriting is what I think pop music is, what I think songwriting is … 

“When I got turned away, I finally was like, ‘OK, may the best song win.’ I was playing some Caribbean songs today, an urban Kanye West song ‘cause I’ve been going to a lot of the Sunday Services. Pop music is a lot of things.”

Treat Myself more than bears that out. But just as importantly, it takes Trainor’s always sunny, empowering outlook and delivers those rise-up nuggets tempered by understanding how brutal the undertow can be. Refusing to relinquish the things she loves, she just keeps coming – and that’s no small feat.

“I’m so fragile and emotional as a songwriter, and you try to stay off the phone,” she explains. “But you’ll see a post that’s so awful. It’s somebody you’ll never see in a basement somewhere, and you have to remember that. It can be a horrible world, and this electric thing we all use as a shield? We all realize that person must be so broken, so shattered to be that mean.

“It’s like the media talking shit and [creating] drama. Sometimes it helps people’s careers, but life is so much not about that stuff. It’s just the wrong focus.

“So I’m trying to look at all of it in non-negative ways. When I’m exhausted and have to fly across the country and the ocean, I don’t think I’m tired, I think, ‘Wow! You mean, we get to go to London and live for a couple weeks? How cool is this?’ Whatever’s going on, that’s how I try to see it, because it helps.”

In a world where it’s tempting to dismiss the fun-seeking, go-girl types as air-headed or ditzy, Trainor no longer cares. Of course, as Ehrlich points out, when it came time to cast his “Tribute to Quincy Jones,” there was only one person to do Leslie Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me,” which Jones produced on a then-17-year-old girl.

“This ballad, sotto voce, then full power ballad is tricky,” the TV veteran explains. “Then you factor in what the song’s saying? The times we’re in? She was the first and only person I thought of to deliver it. And Quincy loved her version.”

That’s strong praise. Not that Trainor, who’s just 26, is so worried about praise these days. With a studio in her house, a list of friends she can collaborate with and a husband “who’s obsessed with my body,” she’s got a whole lot of grooves on.
“I got to a place where I do feel ‘I am hot! I am beautiful! Look at me …’” she says. “I write a song a day. It’s exciting as a writer hearing people, thinking, ‘They’re singing my lyrics.’ I try to write every song to be universal, so everyone can sing it … I’m going to write what I’m going through, sure, but so are a lot of other people. If it’s their song, too, that’s what every writer hopes.”