voice is coming from Madison Beer’s laptop – but her mouth isn’t moving. “Hi, it’s Madison Beer. I’m 24 years old. I’m 5ft 6in and…” Her face folds into a frown. “Where the hell did that just come from? I just clicked one button. I’m so confused!” She has just discovered that a recording of her own voice is playing over our Zoom call. “It was a self-tape,” she brushes it off quickly. “Anyway, sorry, go ahead!”
It’s odd that Beer has been working on a self-tape given that the 24-year-old is a pop singer, not an actor. She’s been in the music business for more than a decade now, having been scouted by Justin Bieber at just 13 years old when she became a child pop star and viral sensation. Since then, Beer has released one studio album, one EP and 22 singles and has become known for her radio-ready pop vocals. Today, we’re speaking because Beer is about to release her second album, Silence Between Songs.
Beer is lounging on her bed at her Los Angeles home, her back resting against a stack of pillows with her computer perched in her lap. She’s wearing an oversized sweater that reads “EXCUSE ME!” in bright blue letters and has not long woken up. Even so, she looks put together as she rubs her eyes with her French-manicured hands. Her silky chestnut-coloured hair runs down in front of her shoulders and hits the slogan embroidered on her chest.
It all began when a comb-over era Justin Bieber tweeted a link to a video of Beer singing Etta James’s “At Last”. “13 years old!” Bieber tweeted in 2012. “She can sing #future star.” Beer went from being the daughter of a real estate developer and an interior designer who recorded YouTube covers on the weekends from her home in Jericho, New York, to a perfectly packaged child star ready to be plonked in front of a camera. It was her dream. “That was one of the most pivotal moments of my career meeting [Justin], it changed my life forever,” says Beer now, just over a decade later.
Plus, Beer is something of a music geek. She’s obsessed with The Beatles (“If I met Paul McCartney, I’m not making it out of there alive”). She also takes inspiration from The Beach Boys, Tame Impala and Del Rey on the album. “Home To Another One,” is a bouncy synth-inflected number pulling influences from Tama Impala, while Del Rey is channelled in “Nothing Matters” – an orchestral love song fit for a Disney princess movie.
In “Ryder”, Beer is searching for justice of another kind. As she softly sings: “I always left you out, you still love me somehow, you just wanted a friend, didn’t know it then,” she apologises to her brother Ryder, who is three years her junior, for always being hidden by her seismic, fame-sized shadow as they grew up together. Beer tells me now that song is the most “sacred” on the album. “I really did have an apology to give [Ryder] and I felt like he deserved to hear all the things that I said,” she says, shuffling herself into a more comfortable position underneath her duvet. “But at the same time, I think he found peace in it as well. I think hearing [that] and having somebody recognise things that you’ve potentially been through, I think means a lot.”
Beer has felt ready to open up a lot more recently. Her memoir, titled The Half of It, which was released in April, traces the moment she got signed to the moment she found out nude photographs of her were being circulated on the internet. Each chapter is filled with journalling prompts and mental health advice that she has learnt along the way (“I hope people who read it have a bit more empathy towards one another.”)
Madison Beer
In a recent clip shared to Beer’s Instagram Stories, Beer sits before some of her most diehard fans and hits play on Silence Between Songs for the first time. Some cry and wrap their arms around each other. One stares existentially into the distance. Others glare at Beer, in awe of her. Clearly, her fans are at the top of her priority list and getting the “general public” to take her music seriously dropped off that list a while ago.