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When Ella was in year nine, her mum got a job in the States, which took Ella to New York. The names Ella and Miles give a glimpse at the intensity of their mother’s passion for the jazz greats, and Ella’s own tastes broadened with the arrival of her first iPod. Ella’s parents had split when the kids were young Ella says that when it came to raising Ella and older brother Miles, “mum did all the work”. (Ella’s summary: “It’s very residential and then there’s … nothing.”) She would play football on Saturdays, and on Sundays she’d be in church with her grandmother, a minister in a pentecostal church. Let’s just say, tourists on future Ella Mai sightseeing tours won’t be in for the most exciting afternoon of their lives. Security comes over to me: ‘What the hell is this?’”Īll of which would have seemed at best unlikely to the Ella Mai kicking around south-west London hotspots such as Mitcham, Merton and Wimbledon Chase in the early 2000s. Ten months later, a clubber requested Boo’d Up from Bay Area DJ Big Von, who spoke to Rolling Stone and summarised the crowd response thusly: “I saw a fat dude do a cartwheel – a solid cartwheel, he didn’t even fall. “ never said to me: ‘I don’t know if what we’re doing is right.’ He’s stuck by his first gut feeling about me. “We were still very hopeful,” Ella says today.
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In any case, Ella’s third EP came out, and it went down well with her slowly growing fanbase, built through support slots with acts such as Kehlani, but none of the EP’s tracks exactly prompted spontaneous international street parties. Neither of us seems particularly convinced. “I know you want to hear an exciting story,” Ella laughs. There was no magic or drama to the song’s recording, which took place late at night, because that’s when Ella works best, in a studio with just a recording engineer in attendance. “He said: ‘Do you like this?’ I said: ‘Yeah.’” “Mustard just randomly came across it,” Ella remembers. In any case, Mustard only dusted off the song when he and Ella were putting the finishing touches to the three EP releases. It might, Ella supposes, have been passed over by other artists first her producer and label boss DJ Mustard shares an A&R with Rihanna. The reality is that the song, with its very non-2010s nod to early-2000s R&B, had been knocking around in a pile of demos for years. In an era defined by the siren’s call of streaming service algorithms, many artists are finding true creativity to be hard work and reward-free couple that with the fact that the music industry is largely built on happy accidents subsequently passed off as deliberate masterplans, and it is even more refreshing that Ella Mai makes no effort to cast the success of Boo’d Up as remotely premeditated. If there is one theme that defines Ella Mai’s success, it’s figuring things out as she goes along. That’s something I’m still figuring out, to be honest.” “Well,” Ella nods, “that’s the tough thing. They might continue to have difficult years. They won’t have multiple award nominations, or top a billion streams, or have gold-selling albums, or tour with Bruno Mars. The thing is, I begin – and even I’m surprised at how early in our interview Captain Buzzkill is making an appearance – realistically, not all these kids will ever achieve their dreams.
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“It’s a great feeling to know I can have that impact on someone.” “It gives me a lot of satisfaction to know girls can look up to me the way I looked up to Lauryn Hill or Alicia Keys,” she says. One of their mums pulled Ella to one side and said: “Thanks for making the time, she’s had a difficult year.”Įlla is still thinking of all this the next morning as she sits cross-legged on her hotel bed in her off-duty attire: blue beanie, orange hoodie, big smile. After the first night of Ella’s UK tour, she met some of those fans: mostly girls, mostly quite young. On tour, her merch stand offers lyric booklets, designed so that streaming-era audiences can relive the endless hours she spent as a teenager devouring the inlays that came with her favourite CDs. However, she also knows what it is like to be a fan.
#Who produced ella mai trip how to#
Ella Mai knows how to be a pop star, to such an extent that the south London-raised singer’s omnipresent R&B slinker Boo’d Up made her the first British artist since 1992 to top the US R&B chart, and has earned her two Grammy nominations this year.