On her mental health as her star rises: “I feel ambitious about making this sustainable,” she says. “That’s my biggest goal right now. My brain is like: quit right now, take next year off. This industry and artistry fucking thrive on mental illness, burnout, overworking yourself, overextending yourself, not sleeping. You get bigger the more unhealthy you are. Isn’t that so fucked up?” It’s a problem within the music industry, she notes. “The ambition is: how do I not hate myself, my job, my life, and do this?” she says. “Because right now, it’s not working. I’m just scrambling to try to feel healthy.”
“No one understands that it truly falls all on you,” she added. “No one understands except other artists… Sabrina [Carpenter] even texted me: ‘Hey, I feel crazy. I know you feel crazy.’ So it’s, like, girlies leaning on each other.”
On being nominated and possibly winning a GRAMMY: “My mom would love to go to the Grammys or the Brits. I’m kind of hoping I don’t win, because then everyone will get off my ass: ‘See guys, we did it and we didn’t win, bye’! I won’t have to do this again!”
On her record deal: “I probably have one of the best deals ever in modern music because I was like: ‘Fuck you guys, give me what I want or I’m going to do this myself,’” she laughs. “Now I can be like: ‘Look at the numbers, bitch.’”
Her producer (Dan Nigro) created a label just to sign Chappell: The labels soon came knocking, but she’d already inked a deal with Nigro’s imprint Amusement Records (a subsidiary of legacy label Island), which he set up specifically so that he could sign her. (“I was so in love with everything that we were doing,” Nigro told Billboard. “I just believe in [Chappell] so much that I was like: ‘Do I want this added stress in my life? Is it worth it? Yes.’”)
On Hailey Bieber’s Erewhon smoothie: Chappell takes a sip from her Erewhon matcha latte (yes, she’s tried the Hailey Bieber smoothie: “And you know what? All you bitches think this is healthy, but this is just a milkshake!”
On industry plant comments and how long she’s been doing this: “I’m just kind of like, bitch, I’ve been here the whole time! I got signed a year after Ultraviolence came out [in 2014]. That’s how long I’ve been here. That’s how many Lana Del Rey albums are in between!”
On a recent incident at the airport: “I get out of the car, it’s 5.30 in the morning, and there’s two guys waiting with a bunch of posters and shit for me to sign,” Chappell says, her voice tightening again. “I know they’re not fans. I said no. I was like, ‘I don’t sign anything at the airport, I’m sorry.’ [One of them] follows me to the TSA line, starts yelling at me and everyone just turns and looks. He’s like: ‘You should really humble yourself. Do you know where you are right now? Don’t forget where you came from.’ I’m just like: ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I told myself, if this ever gets dangerous, I might quit. It’s dangerous now, and I’m still going. But that part is not what I signed up for.”
“I feel like fame is just abusive. The vibe of this – stalking, talking shit online, [people who] won’t leave you alone, yelling at you in public – is the vibe of an abusive ex-husband. That’s what it feels like. I didn’t know it would feel this bad.” While crying in the bathroom in the airport, she texted Lorde for advice. “She sent me a list of things I should do [in that situation],” Chappell says. “Literally wrote down eight things she wished someone would have told her when she was going through it. And she went through fucking hell. She was a baby!”
Read her full interview and see more photos at the source.
