Beabadoobee doesn’t write songs to be clever. She writes them because she’d go insane if she didn’t.
“I had to write about it or else I was going to go insane,” she says early in the conversation, like someone who’s walked through their own burning house just to take notes on the way out.
Her debut LP Fake It Flowers came crashing in like the coolest sleepover you were never invited to — a mix of grunge guitars, teenage trauma, and shouty therapy sessions dressed as songs. And yet, for all the loud, crunchy, beautifully scuffed edges, it’s the honesty that bruises hardest.
“I was pretty messed up on tour,” she confesses, recalling the strange paradox of being thrown into adulthood while still figuring out who the hell you are. “I had so much time to think about things that happened in my childhood and how that’s affected me as a grown woman.”
She’s not saying this for effect. She really was supposed to be a nursery teacher. University, lesson plans, tiny chairs. Then the universe shoved a guitar in her hand and whispered, “Actually…”
From the jump, Fake It Flowers feels like an exorcism. The loudest, heaviest track, “Charlie Brown,” takes its name from a character who always got the football yanked away, and whose cartoonish melancholy turned out to be the first mental health icon of her life. “It was the first introduction to that kind of mental health — that it’s okay to not be okay,” she says. Also, yes, she has the tattoo.
She shouted that chorus not just because she was angry — but because she didn’t want you to see how sad she really was. “I kind of tried to hide the sadness with me shouting really loudly.”
Fake It Flowers is filled with those contradictions. “Diet Red” starts with a jolt (“kiss my ass”) and never really lets you breathe. But it’s not about her — not directly. “I just wanted to say it straight. I’m not an amazing lyricist with big fancy words. I got kicked out of school — I’m not that intelligent.”
Spoiler: she is. Don’t let the modesty fool you. There’s poetry laced through all of this. Even the poppier “Care,” which she describes as having “an end-of-the-’90s movie vibe,” plays like the final scene of 10 Things I Hate About You if Julia Stiles were scream-singing from a rooftop. “Freaks and Geeks,” The Craft, whatever hormonal VHS you want to imagine — they all live in her bloodstream.
That cinematic quality isn’t an accident. Her boyfriend directs all her videos and wants to be a filmmaker, so their relationship is basically one extended storyboard. “It’s kind of ingrained in my brain now to have this massive imagination.”
And yet, for all the big rock moments and visual flair, some of the most intimate pieces feel like they’re duct-taped together in someone’s bedroom. “How Was Your Day?” was recorded on a shitty four-track in a garden. “Very Daniel Johnston inspired,” she says, reverently. “You can hear the mistakes. You can hear the breathing. That’s why I love it.”
Bea’s love for lo-fi purity isn’t just aesthetic. It’s spiritual. “You can hear the innocence in it,” she says, as if describing a ghost that haunts the corners of her songs. You believe her. She’s not performing any of this.
Which makes it all the more disorienting when she casually drops that the next thing is already finished. While Fake It Flowers was still being introduced to the world, she was already onto the next emotional bloodletting.
“I’m taking a break from properly writing,” she shrugs. “Because I’ve already written the next thing.”
It’s fine. Let the rest of us catch up.
Watch/Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
