Bebe Rexha shares her mental health battles on new record Better Mistakes

Music star Bebe Rexha writes songs to help her fans not feel alone in their mental health challenges. But they don’t always help her.

Bebe Rexha doesn’t do crocodile tears. When the Meant To Be stream queen had to get into the zone for the opening scenes of her video for new single Sabotage, she stirred up the emotional muscle memory that had fuelled the song’s lyrics. And started bawling.

“I cried so much I had to use eyedrops. After that scene, I was so drained I was asking if we were done for the day and they’re like ‘It’s the first scene’. This sucks, I’m over this,” she says.

“I was just thinking about why I sabotage myself, the times I feel like I didn’t deserve something because I wasn’t good enough, the thoughts I have that are not the nicest thoughts, but things that I really believed. And it always does it.”

Rexha is at the vanguard of her generation of female songwriters who have claimed the top of the charts with pop bangers that unpack the mental health challenges they share with millions of fans.

Like Lizzo, Billie Eilish and Alessia Cara, the I’m A Mess hitmaker has been a fierce advocate for the body positivity movement, calling out the fashion industry when designers wouldn’t dress her for the 2019 Grammys because she was larger than their “show sizes.”

She also publicly shared she was diagnosed with bipolar I disorder. Break My Heart Myself, which features Travis Barker, is the opening track of her upcoming second album Better Mistakes and references how she lives with the condition.

“Hello, my name is Stevie / Actually, I’m lying. It’s really Bebe. / It’s the meds. They make me really sleepy. / Klonopin, my friend, yeah, she numbs the feeling,” she sings.

So for every banger – like the record’s recent singles Die For a Man with Lil Uzi Vert and Baby I’m Jealous with Doja Cat – there is a song revealing her darker moments when her mind or chemical make-up make getting through the day a struggle.

While many songwriters will speak of the catharsis offered by channelling their demons into art, Rexha says songwriting “doesn’t really” help with the “work” required to live with her disorder.

Bebe’s songs help her fans … but not her. Picture: Supplied.

“It just gets that emotion out, you know, but the actual work takes therapy, a lot of work,” she says.

“The title is about when I was a teenager, I thought I was going to grow up and … my anxiety would be gone and everything would be so perfect, I would be perfect,” she says.

“You get older, everything’s just the same. I’m just older. So I’m trying to make better mistakes and trying to figure out how this whole life thing works out.”

Better Mistakes was pretty much finished before the pandemic and then the Black Lives Matter movement in America prompted the music industry there to press pause on releasing a raft of new music.

Rexha, who was a go-to songwriter in the US, helping to pen hits for Eminem, Nick Jonas and Selena Gomez before launching her own artist career, spent the hiatus finetuning the final mixes of her songs rather than making new ones.

Rexha is at the forefront of the pop body positivity movement. Picture: Supplied.

Better Mistakes builds on the pop sound of now she helped craft on her 2018 album Expectations and smash hit collaborations Meant To Be with Florida Georgia Line and In The Name Of Love with Martin Garrix.

“The song I’m most proud of is I’m A Mess because I felt it’s the most honest and the real Bebe. That’s me,” she says.

“So I wanted to make an album that was an extension of that, take I’m A Mess and push it to be more hip hop or more dance to hear what could happen.

“I wanted to keep the vulnerability and honesty because that’s what my fans really connect with, just like they did with the first song I ever put down, I’m Going To Show You Crazy.”

Rexha wants teen mental health to be taken more seriously. Picture: Supplied.

Rexha recalls her early days when that song would bring scores of fans to her merchandise stall after a show to share their own stories of battles with eating disorders, self-harm and other mental health challenges.

She would sit at that stall for hours talking to them.

“They had a lot of angst and wanted to be somewhere that they didn’t feel alone,” she says.

“I would sit in my tent selling merch and talking to those fans … I felt connected to those people and we’ve grown together talking about the issues of mental health.

“People put that stuff down to teenagers being moody and stuff and it’s not just about hormones and it doesn’t just go away when you grow up.

“I’m just trying to give them the songs they want to hear.”

Better Mistakes is out on May 7.