Ella Eyre "didn’t really grieve" after her father’s death.
The 25-year-old singer’s dad – who lived in Jamaica, whilst she grew up in London with her mother – passed away in April 2017 and Ella admits that she struggled to process her feelings in the months that followed.
In an interview with Independent.co.uk,, Ella said: "I didn’t really grieve, didn’t really give myself time to get over it or even think about it. I just worked and worked and worked. I worked myself up into this really tight space where I was so anxious and stressed and also very clearly upset about what had happened, but hadn’t dealt with it."
The ‘Waiting All Night’ hitmaker admitted that her turmoil affected her songwriting ability.
Ella said: "It caught up with me. I wasn’t able to write as well. I was just feeling frustrated."
The ‘Just Got Paid’ hitmaker’s dad died the day before she was scheduled to play a comeback gig in Camden, North London, and although she was urged by her team and friends to cancel the show Ella decided to go ahead with it because her father had never seen her perform, and she had the feeling he was watching from above.
She explained: "I didn’t know what the f**k to do. I just didn’t tell anybody.
"A lot of people had been waiting for this show for a long time and if this was going to be the first time he saw a show, I wasn’t going to cancel it. It was the best thing I could have done. I got so much from that gig."
As she struggled with writer’s block in the wake of her dad’s death, Ella took a trip to her father’s homeland, Jamaica, and as soon as she "connected to that part of my bloodline again" her creativity came flooding back.
She said: "I needed to just rip the band-aid off and see what happens.
"You can get so caught up in this hurricane of work and this pressure that if you’re not working, it’s going to dry up. But actually finding the strength to do things for myself benefited me creatively. My first album was my friends and my nights out and my life experiences I had growing up, and I’d lost that because I was fully in artist mode. I was on tour, I was doing interviews … I wasn’t actually living."
Ella Eyre didn’t properly grieve her father’s death
