Jade Thirlwall struggled to feel “relevant” after stepping back from the “pressure machine” that was Little Mix.
The 31-year-old singer – who shot to fame in the ‘X Factor’ girl group in 2011 and uses the solo moniker JADE – has released her debut solo single, ‘Angel Of My Dreams’, which features a sample of Sandie Shaw’s Eurovision-winning tune ‘Puppet On A String’, and admitted it took her a while to find her place in music.
She told British Vogue: “Little Mix was such a machine and there was so much pressure to be ‘huge’. I had been programmed to feel like I had to constantly be in the public eye for 11 years, and so I’ve struggled with feeling ‘relevant’ since taking a step back and having people around me be like, ‘It’s okay to not go to the opening of an envelope!’”
Speaking of her music video for ‘Angel Of My Dreams’, she admitted: “It’s a reflection of the industry I’m addicted to despite hating what it so often stands for.
“It’s the kind of thing you have to watch back for it to make sense.”
It was suggested that the lyric “sold my soul to a psycho” was a dig at ‘X Factor’ boss Simon Cowell, who ran the now-defunct Syco Music, but Jade clarified in an interview with Beat magazine: “It’s not specifically about that.
“But I wanted the song to be my journey, from entering the music business to now, and what that’s felt like. That’s why the song feels so chaotic.
“The opening is like the music to that montage bit on The X Factor after you’ve won, and you’re just catapulted into the industry.”
She added: “I don’t want to sit here and bash the last 13 years of my life. I’m very happy and content. But like with any job, there are highs and lows. That’s just life, and it’s my reality, but it’s about writing it in a way that’s not woe is me.”