Amelia Perry
“I think it will always feel pretty surreal”, Em Beihold tells me. “It’s just silly! This morning I saw a Billboard article saying they thought I was a contender for Best New Artist at the Grammys – and I’m waking up in my childhood bedroom reading that”. The 23-year-old singer-songwriter is speaking to me from her parent’s home in California, where despite what her song Groundhog Day might suggest, she’s still happily living. It’s been a busy summer for her, having released her sophomore EP, Egg in the Backseat on July 22nd and completed sold-out shows in London, Amsterdam, Berlin and LA to celebrate. Later in the year, she’ll be joining King Princess on tour, kicking off in Denver on October 17th.
Em started playing the piano aged six, having begged her parents to buy her one in a store window and then went on to write her first song, America Home just a year later. “It was very patriotic!”, she promises me, “I don’t really remember how it came about but I do still know all the words”.
“It was really my whole life for many years… because I wanted to fence in college, that was my main goal”
Aged 8, Em discovered fencing, taking lessons from her dad in the driveway. After a while, she joined a club and became an All-American fencing champion at NCAA level, at which point it, “was basically a part-time job with how much time it took training and everything”. The discipline required at that high level of competitive sport has, however, taught her skills she’s found to be particularly valuable in her music career – “just important life skills like time-management and goal-setting”. Persistence is key, she tells me. “Sometimes”, she explains, “you don’t want to go to practice, but you have to. And with songwriting, you have all these writing sessions in your calendar, but you’re not necessarily inspired to write a song… but just doing it and using that muscle is important.”
Em’s persistence is, of course, what’s helped her massive success on TikTok. Though you might think that after the success of her songs, particularly Numb Little Bug (certified RIAA gold, debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 and garnered 12 million streams in its first week), her time on TikTok would be plain sailing, it hasn’t been straightforward. It really is a case of continuing to post, she assures me, bluntly stating, “the algorithm doesn’t owe you anything – I might think a certain song is really relatable and should take off, but it doesn’t. I just have to try not to get down about it”.
NUMB LITTLE BUG IS OFFICIALLY #1 ON HOT AC RADIO I COULD CRY https://t.co/EgDz81Zlee
— Em Beihold (@EmBeihold) July 31, 2022
“I’m super proud of it. It’s funny because when people make EPs and albums they really slave away over it but most of those songs were literally written in a day.”
When asked what she feels her biggest strength as an artist is, she doesn’t hesitate in telling me it’s all down to her honesty and willingness to be incredibly open with her audience. “With Numb Little Bug, people were always asking if I felt like I’d spilt too much, and, no, I don’t see it like that at all… when I write it’s very cathartic – I don’t see any point in holding back”.
Recalling her first EP, Infrared, which was released in 2017 as, “exploring writing for the first time… I recorded that whole EP with my piano teacher in the room where I would take lessons”, she does note that it wasn’t quite the finished product she wanted, though it felt like “taking those first steps towards what my version of an EP should be”.
Though she does occasionally write alone, she now prefers doing so with Egg in the Backseat collaborators (and now friends), Alex Veltri and Dallas Caton as well as Michael Coleman and James Ghaleb. “It usually starts with a little melody or hook and then I write the whole song around that phrase”. Naturally, she feels this group of co-writers made working on Egg in the Backseat a far easier process than the first time round, with most of the songs coming together in a day, such as 12345 which, she tells me, “was written the first time I met Alex and Dallas”. Though usually, “when you have a session with people for the first time the goal is to feel out the vibes, not necessarily write one of your favourite songs”.
“All of a sudden there were all these comments from trolls saying, ‘That’s what it looks like when you have no friends'”
She’s refreshingly realistic about what it means to have a platform in 2022, admitting that compared to the mystique and glamour of celebrity culture in the early 2000s, on TikTok, “it’s definitely a very different world. People feel like they can say whatever they want about you”. She does, however, also note that being labelled as a TikTok artist has its own connotations. There’s a “content over quality vibe”, she tells me, “like ‘Oh, they’re a TikTok artist! They got famous and now they make music’ which I don’t want to be associated with, because I’ve always been making music”.
The algorithm is not the only challenge faced by creators. For better or for worse, trolls come with the territory. She recalls one incident where she posted a video with the clone filter, “like my song, 12345 – there were five clones”, what should have been an inoffensive piece of promo. Instead, “all of a sudden there were all these comments from trolls saying, “That’s what it looks like when you have no friends… I’m left thinking I’m just using a filter … why did you have to go there?”. Her reaction, however, is simply that, “people can be very harsh, you just have to not pay mind to it”. She tells me that she wants to get to a point where she can just stop reading comments and, “disengage entirely” and though she’s not there yet, “I do try not to watch the numbers because that shouldn’t validate you”.
“So the best piece of advice is just set boundaries, know your limits – you don’t have to do everything.”
Looking forward to her upcoming tour, Em tells me that the goal is simply, “to have as much fun as possible”. Though she’s found herself enjoying it, performing was never her original goal – “it just kind of happened when Bug blew up… I just wasn’t drawn to it like some people are”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the highlight of shows is meeting her fans. Hearing that her music has made people feel less alone, “is the most gratifying result I could ever ask for”, and though she spends a lot of her time DMing people, however actually “meet[ing] those people and see[ing] their faces make it so real – they aren’t pixels on a screen anymore”.
Em’s been very open about how Numb Little Bug came about after feeling overwhelmed with everything that was going on, combined with being on anti-depressants. Though she is now a little more at ease with it all, she tells me that, “it’s very intense and sometimes because you’re trying to capitalise on a moment you expend all of your energy and it’s a lot – too much actually.”
She knows the importance of networking, but also of balance, telling me that, “the best piece of advice is just set boundaries, know your limits – you don’t have to do everything. I’ll show face sometimes and then other nights there’s an industry event and I stay home and embroider.”
As for what’s next, she tells me “I’m gonna take a one-week break with my band because you’d be surprised how few breaks there have been this year. So, we’re gonna go somewhere tropical and put our phones away and I can’t wait.”
Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash. No changes were made to this image. Image license can be found here.
Egg in the Backseat is available to stream now.
Amelia Perry
Amelia (Millie) is a former Editor in Chief here at Empoword Journalism and is a third-year History of Art student at the University of St Andrews where she is the deputy editor at The Saint. Aside from writing, she enjoys true crime podcasts, a good book and attempting to cook.