It’s natural for our creative sensibilities to shift as we get older. We get wiser, gain more experience and even more perspective. Over time, while we continue to love the music we consumed in the past, it’s expected that our boundaries expand and our tastes change and broaden.
But what about from the artist’s viewpoint? For Betty Who, who has consistently delivered bops over the last 10 years, a question has been front of mind recently: “Oh fuck, what do I write about?”
“Sometimes I’ll be on stage and put on an outfit and think, ‘Did I just come out here and sing some songs I made up so you guys can clap for me?’ I don’t know if it is. I don’t think that ‘I need you to clap for me’ is my reason,” admits Betty, 33. “Now I am looking at my approach to my projects and my approach to making music as, ‘What do I want to say?’ but also, ‘What do other people need to hear?’”
One thing that is clear on this journey of creative self-reflection, though, is Betty Who’s love for the pop genre.
“There’s something about pop. I’m a pop girl stan. I grew up watching Britney Spears and thinking it doesn’t have to mean something; she’s just incredibly beautiful and she’s shaking her abs for me and I’m 4 years old and I’m gagging and I don’t even know why. It speaks to me. I’m just here,” she says. “But I think when you can take a moment and go, ‘But this is why we’re here’ — the ‘why’ is a big question for me right now.”That question was one of the primary drivers behind Betty’s song, “Run!,” released in April. The artist, who is queer and has a massive LGBTQ+ following, will bring her latest songs — including her latest single, “Sweat” — on her “Out of the Darkness” summer tour.
Recently, Betty shared her inspiration for the tour, insights about her songwriting process and why creative sustainability is her new focus.
We all know that pop is your superpower, but what’s your mid-power? For me, it’s customer service calls.
And you’re excellent at it. Not a superpower because you’re not flying, but you’re like, “I’m handling it.” I know exactly what mine is, Eve; mine is silly. Mine is big “my mother” energy. Any time I meet a server I’m, “Hey, what’s your name?” And then I use it the whole time and go like, “Thank you so much my friend” when speaking to customer service. It’s my excellent small talk with people in the service industry — I like to be the one person who made their day not miserable. That is my mid-power.
Spreading joy and kindness in your daily life is very on brand. Your single “Run!” is high-energy and very positive, and it focuses on your own story and on rekindling the excitement and exuberance you had when you first started your career. Could you walk me through what inspired you to write this track?
I am the number one person who is the hardest on myself. I just wrote a different song about this entire same experience. I think that something I’m really working through in my creativity is trying to figure out [why] I have so much kindness for the waiter that I ask what their name is and I try to make their life easier but then up here? It’s mental illness, innit? [Laughs] It’s really hard; I have moments sometimes where I come up and out of my body and say, “What if I was nicer? What if I didn’t spend all of my mental and emotional energy doing this to myself?” When I watched “The Substance,” there is a very pivotal moment where the two people are alive at the same time and they just start beating the shit out of each other. And I had one of those moments where I came up and out of my body and I was like, “Whoa, that’s me to me. Oh.” So I think that that is something that “Run!” also kind of encapsulates.
A huge part of putting yourself out there is audacity. That person still lives within me, but now I’m a lot less motivated to make her dreams come true because we’ve seen some things. You get older, you stumble a few too many times on the path to the life that you want and you’re like, “This is hard, and I’m tired.” And how do I continue to find a new way to approach building the life that I always wanted with that same kind of intensity and focus? It’s really an attempt to lock into that person and now, I have to do it for her. It’s looking back at that little girl watching Britney Spears and going, “She wanted to be on stage, and now you have the chance to be on stage and you better use it, girlfriend!”
As audacious as it is, I truly think you need some youthful naivete to start a creative career because if you knew what you know now it might be too terrifying to begin! How has your creative approach changed since the start of your career?
I was in “Hadestown” on Broadway, which sort of changed my life but also eight shows a week for six months was a totally new experience for me, and coming off of that, the last thing I wanted to do was anything. So the last year and a half I really have taken this time to be like, “What does it feel like to be a person in this moment in my life that is not chasing a dream every single second of every day that I am alive?” And I think in this stage of my life where I am very happily married, with my dog, and in this tiny little house that we love, there are so many things about my life that are exactly as I would want them to be. I feel so lucky for that, but then I go to the studio to write a song and go, “Oh fuck, what do I write about?” I’m so happy, but it doesn’t really move the needle for me creatively in the same way that the ever-flowing sort of drama of my early 20s did.
I also think that knowing what I know about my community and how small and mighty we are, a huge part of what I love to do is make people feel seen and held and loved and creating a space where you can go, “Nobody in my life makes me feel this way, but I listened to this song and it makes me feel like I can go on another day.” That’s the power of music to me and what we do. So I am trying to lock into that place. Yes, there are some songs where I’m just trying to have fun and I’m not trying to say anything crazy or motivational. Like, I’m putting out a song for Pride called “Sweat” and it’s not that difficult; we don’t have to think that hard. But there are moments moving forward that are less self-serving but more exciting at this stage in my life.
Queer joy feels so necessary in the current political climate, so sometimes even a song just about having fun can be so subversive. Fittingly, your tour is called “Out of the Darkness.” Can you share more about how you arrived at the name?
We went back and forth a little bit about what to call the tour because I had a couple of different ideas, but for me, “Out of the Darkness” definitely symbolized something I had been going through, which was reemerging from my cave and literally from this room playing notes on a piano. But I think that I’m trying to think of my show in that same sort of community service way. For “Out of the Darkness,” my entire approach and my goal for the tour is to create an environment where I go, “Hey, I know things are really crazy.” And everybody has their own version, whether you’re really engaged politically and [are aware of how] they’re trying to take our rights away or if you’re like, “I can’t pay for my groceries,” I’m like, totally diva, bad vibes only.
There’s a lot of stuff going on and [at the upcoming shows we can] acknowledge that it’s a difficult time and choose joy regardless and create an environment to dip in for a second and talk about pain. And let’s explore that through song, and let’s move together through these emotions where we could leave some of that behind. Let’s try to let go of a little bit of our dread, because there is so much dread, and there are days where I’m like, “How am I supposed to not feel horrible all the time?” Live music has always been something that, for me, brings me up and out of myself, and I’m trying to create an environment where we can celebrate in spite of what is going on in the world.
The beauty of live music and particularly a pop show is that you can go to just have fun, but it can serve as a feedback loop for what feels like energy transfer between the performer and the audience, which can be so positive. Sometimes you leave a concert feeling like you’re floating two feet off of the ground.
And the way that music plays a role in our daily lives, as well. I’ve always believed that your favorite song plays at the grocery store and all of sudden I’m like, “I love this song” and I’m picking up my rice and I’m like, hell yeah: “We begin to rock steady!” Or whatever is playing, like Michelle Branch’s “Everywhere” that I always hear in CVS.
It’s the way that music comes at us in our life both diegetically and non-diegetically — we are choosing music as well as being fed it everywhere we go. So I think that that thing you’re talking about — I always forget how meaningful it can be to go see an artist whose music you love and you give them a chance to reawaken your love for that music and the catalog. Our world runs on hit songs in some way, but then there are albums and albums of music that people forget about and people forget they love songs and people go, “I heard this song and it didn’t mean anything to me but now that you’ve sung it live I have a whole new relationship to it.”
I think I’m not alone in feeling like various songs can serve as windows to specific types of emotions or energy. Music serves as such a powerful connector. And I think artists are especially skilled at connecting people, so it makes sense to me that shifting to a post-Covid world that is just now getting back into the swing of live performances again would shift and impact how you approach things creatively.
I’m entering this new phase that’s only just now starting to reveal itself to me, and then another 10 years will go by, which is how long I’ve been doing this already, and then I’ll have a totally new experience. I think I spent a lot of time in the first decade of my career feeling very lost because I knew I had so much to give and I didn’t know what the path was or the purpose was. It’s the young person I was talking about in the beginning of “Run!” who’s like, “I know that I’m supposed to do this but I just don’t know even what that means, and I don’t know where I’m going. I’m just going to run as fast as I can.” And then, all of a sudden, I look around and I’m in the middle of a field and then I’m like, “Well, how did I get here and why am I alone?” So I think what feels really nice in this new phase as it reveals itself to me is sustainability.
You are meant to burn yourself out when you’re 22 — the whole point is because you can. And every time I reenter a phase of making music again the burnout cycle begins. Every single time I’ve started to make a record I’ve started on day one looking at day 850 going, “I already know how it’s going to feel and I’m already afraid; I’m scared.” There are moments of course where I go, “Oh, this feels so good,” but by the end of the cycle I have the exact same feeling that that was so much output and I feel like something has been taken from me. And every cycle after it’s taken me longer and longer to try and find it again.
Now, it’s very [much about] breaking the cycle where I’m not just going to stand on day one and look at day 800 and say, “Here we go again.” It’s like, “No, day one, and now all I want to talk about is day two.” That is what feels exciting to me. It’s about sustainability, it’s about joy, and I don’t think you should be living your dream and be miserable the whole time. That is not the point. And I think that that is a big struggle in any artist’s life: the reality of the art versus the thing that we have, which is an expectation of living a dream. If I want to go to medical school, then I know that that means that this thing happens, and then I get a residency, and then I get a job; there is a path. There is no path for any artist. It is our own journey that we are carving every day.
You said that when you performed in “Hadestown” on Broadway there was very little time to recuperate because of the schedule, but on your own tour, you’ve learned from dancers who have to stretch and prep their bodies daily that that is the best way they can achieve longevity and sustainability. What has it been like adhering to a more sustainable tour approach?
In the transformation into Persephone in “Hadestown,” I come in as me and then they put the wig on me and the lashes on and I have these crazy nails that are 17 inches long — and the least me thing of all time — and then all of a sudden I’m her, I get to work, and then it all comes off and I’m me again. It’s been hard for me to find that separation between me and Betty Who because it is so personal. And so “Run!” is about me and exactly what happened in my life, but it’s more like a metaphor. I wrote that from my own lens about something I think everybody experiences. And so, I think the selfishness of it was what was so intoxicating about it for so long, and now it’s the thing that makes it really unsustainable. Shifting that mindset a little bit has helped me approach it from less of a, “If you don’t like this then that means that I am bad” approach that is heartbreaking.
What I want is to be surrounded by people who love me and see me. I want to make breakfast for me and my husband and walk the dog and do all of those things that feel so much more zoomed in — and that is what my real life is. And the fact that I get to go out and play shows for thousands of people over the summer is not totally all that I am, and it is more of a job now as opposed to the way it used to be, which was my entire identity which I think is healthier [laughs] and it helps me enjoy it more.
This new perspective also brought new songs, in addition to “Run!” Can fans expect to hear some of those tracks during your tour?
I’m really excited about this new music. I have taken everything so seriously for so long and we’re at a time where everything feels so dire, and I’m really trying to create an energy of fun as joy as protest — I think if you come to a show this summer that is what you will experience. I really want you to come and let it all out.
I want you to come and dance, I want you to come with an open heart and mind and move through some things so that you can find the ability to let loose and scream your heart out to “I Love You Always Forever,” Donna Lewis, 1996 — still going strong with Betty Who in 2025. That’s the whole point. These moments that make life worth living is when you look around and you’re looking at your best friend because a song makes you think of them and you’re singing it to them in the room. That is, to me, the lifeblood of the reason we are all here: to feel joy and share moments. I’m really trying to create that moment on tour. We will run out of the darkness together.
