“My nose will not scrunch unless I feel it,” Bellah Mae tells Apple Music, recalling the way she felt in summer 2022 after she wrote “Boyfriend of the Year”, the viral TikTok hit that propelled the then unsigned singer-songwriter to breakout fame. “It just does something to you that you feel inside,” she tells Apple Music. “I always make sure that if I’m going to put a song out, I get that kind of grit feel from it.” It’s an instinct that has served her well so far: In the year that followed, she landed a major label record deal, sold out a headline tour and released her debut EP With All Due Disrespect. Born in Solihull and raised on a musical diet influenced by her grandfather, who was part of a rock ’n’ roll band, Bellah Mae developed an early taste for the flavours of Americana. “I’m so grateful that I had that as my introduction to music, because I was so in awe of the way they told stories,” she says. She was a teenager when she discovered pop music and was instantly drawn to country-leaning acts such as Taylor Swift and Hannah Montana—the fictional superstar played by actual superstar, Miley Cyrus—and the pop-rock stylings of Avril Lavigne. “Hundreds and hundreds” of songs later, Bellah Mae’s own artistic voice is now pitched to a tone that harmonises all the formative sounds of her youth: quirky, autobiographical sentiments set to grungy guitar riffs polished to a glossy pop shine. She credits her idiosyncratic lyricism to time spent in Nashville, learning the tricks of the trade from the Song Suffragettes, an all-female songwriting collective she first became involved with on her first trip to the songwriting mecca as an 18-year-old. “They really taught me how to articulate an emotion that everyone relates to, but in a way that makes you think a little bit,” she says. With All Due Disrespect, however, is all Bellah Mae. Exploring the painful ending to a painful relationship—camouflaging the hurt and sadness with zingy hooks and vibrant, bouncing beats—the narrative draws directly from personal experiences she has since discovered many of her fans can share in. The response has helped ground her through a year of whirlwind success. “The music industry is hard, like many other industries, but at the end of each day people reach out to tell me that my lyrics have helped them get through similar situations,” she says. “It’s really special to know that you’re helping and connecting. As a songwriter, that’s very rewarding.” Here, she takes us through the story behind With All Due Disrespect, track by track. “Boyfriend of the Year” “This could have very easily been a sad song, because it was written about a very sad situation. It’s about being left by someone you’re with and them moving on with the person they told you not to worry about. It’s very relatable, but also a sad—and very modern—true story. I love that it’s so specific and so angsty. I think it’s a perfect representation of me, because it’s got unique lyrics that couldn’t be in many other pop songs. The second verse is, ‘The first time that you had her over/Did you cook her up a carbonara’, and you don’t really hear that in a pop song, but so many girls have messaged me after saying, ‘Oh my god, he made me carbonara too!’ It’s such a go-to thing to do.” “Feels Like You Died” “This EP really embodies the different stages of healing and grief. Articulating how a breakup actually feels in words is like, they’re just not there anymore. It’s so final and it’s so odd and I feel like not many humans know how to deal with it, even though we all go through it many times in our life.” “On Purpose (For My Future Daughter)” “I had a one-off session in the diary with Kingdoms and a Norwegian topliner, Lotte [Mørkved]. I’d never worked with any of them before and this was the first song we wrote. I think the only thing worse than being hurt by somebody you love is realising that they knew what they were doing. It’s a very different way of processing and moving on from that experience than if you had been hurt accidentally. You start to look at life quite differently. I had ‘on purpose’ in my notes and I thought it was such an obvious statement and great for a sad song. I think sad songs need simple titles—I don’t want to work that hard to figure out what a song is about when I’m on the floor crying, it just needs to hit home.” “Drama King” “My A&R manager put me in a session with [songwriter] Alex O’Shaughnessy and [producer] Alex Stacy very early on, and this was the first song we ever wrote together. We wrote pretty much the rest of the EP from there, which was a very convenient ‘I bumped into my future husband at a coffee shop and we’ve been married ever since’ kind of creative love story. They’ve both been in relationships since they were 16, and then there’s me, just raging. I think that’s what makes them such amazing songwriters, because they really listen to how I feel and get into that headspace. I’m not a man-hater but my brand is very women-focused and I have an opportunity to be able to say certain things because of the position I'm in. And no one ever calls men dramatic, so I was like, 'I’m going to do it!' They really held my hand through that process.” “Mr. Hypocrite” “This is the big sister to ‘Drama King’. It just goes that one step further. I still had more to say about this person, there’s still so many ways that he was such a contradiction. Give me another three minutes of air time! At this point I was past being mad about how this person treated me and starting to have fun with it, just picking apart his character. I always say I would never date a songwriter because we’re so brutal. We’re very emotional and we live in a world where everything could be a concept or a lyric, so we blow things out of proportion. I do feel slightly bad because the songs are doing quite well now, so more people are hearing them. If anyone from that time in my life knows who that person is then… bless!” “Date Your Dad” “So, this song is about dating someone’s potential. As a straight woman who dates men, I’m very aware that men and women mature and go through their twenties at very drastically different paces. You can be dating somebody and feel like, ‘There’s so much there that could be so amazing, but you’re still [mentally] 15, all you want to do is drink beers and go kiss girls and I need somebody more mature who’s got it together, so I’m going to date your dad.’ It’s all very hypothetical—and if I did want to date anyone’s dad, I wouldn’t be able to say. For legal reasons.”