Mae Muller, the UK’s candidate for the Eurovision Song Contest in May, shared some details about her intense preparation schedule for the upcoming competition, while speaking to Alison Hammond and Dermot O’Leary on ITV’s This Morning.
“I’m rehearsing a lot,” said Muller. “The preparation is wild. We have these kind of pre-parties where you get to perform the songs, so I’m feeling ready now, but I feel like by the 13th of May I’m going to be locked in.”
The 25-year-old north London-raised vocalist will be the first female entrant for the UK since SuRie competed in 2018 with the track Storm.
Like Ryder, Muller is not new to the music industry. She released her debut single Close in 2018 and climbed the charts with the 2021 song Better Days after it went viral on TikTok.
At this year’s Eurovision competition, she will perform a new song that she wrote called I Wrote A Song (yes, it does sound like the title of a song in a spoof film about Eurovision, but we’re firmly in favour).
“I actually wrote the song before the opportunity of Eurovision came about,” Muller explained on the morning show. “It was literally like the stars aligned, because then two or three days later I met up with management, and they were like, what do you feel about Eurovision?”
Here are five facts to know about the UK hopeful.
She fully committed to music as a teen
Muller was born in 1997 in Kentish Town, north London, and has described herself as a natural performer from a young age.
Last year she told the Golden Plectrum website her aunt is a music video director and she used to spend afternoons as a runner for chart-topping artists such as Labrinth.
Muller was 19 when she wrote her first song, Close, which was produced by a family friend and “paid” for with wine in lieu of money.
Once uploaded to Soundcloud, the song attracted the attention of record labels and she signed to Capitol.
Speaking about starting in music at 19, she previously said: “I feel really lucky that in a way I’ve lived a relatively normal life.”
Female solo artists have been instrumental in her development
Muller inherited a love of Prince and Sade from her parents, with both artists being regularly played around the house.
It was only later when she discovered Gwen Stefani and the No Doubt star’s debut solo album Love Angel Music Baby (which was released in 2004) that she began to develop her own tastes.
Florence + The Machine and Lily Allen were also early favourites and would shape her own songwriting in future years.
TikTok was instrumental in her breakthrough
Muller has so far scored one minor hit – the 2021 track Better Days which was made with Swedish producers Neiked and American rapper Polo G.
The track went viral on TikTok, which helped boost its streams to more than a million across all platforms. Better Days peaked at number 32 in the UK, but also charted across the world.
This is similar to Sam Ryder’s route to Eurovision. Ryder also found success on TikTok, covering pop songs during lockdown before he was selected to compete for the UK.
Muller was chosen by the same music company that scouted Ryder
The BBC hopes to repeat the UK’s success at the 2022 event by once again joining with global management company TaP Music.
TaP Music, which has counted Lana Del Rey and Ellie Goulding among its clients, helped select Muller, and will also help craft her promotional strategy ahead of the contest.
Last year the company revamped the UK’s strategy after years of dismal results – and the new approach was successful: Sam Ryder came in second place.
This new strategy included ensuring Ryder’s single, Space Man, got played on BBC Radio 1 instead of Radio 2 and also saw him targeting smaller countries such as San Marino, Serbia, Croatia and Malta, which have the same voting powers as larger countries such as Germany.
Muller was born in the year the UK last won Eurovision
The UK last triumphed at the contest in 1997 with Katrina And The Waves topping the leaderboard with their anthem Love Shine A Light in Dublin. That win will seem distant to Muller, who was born the same year, but she will still be hoping to mirror that success with her own track, I Wrote A Song.
