Meghan Trainor appears on screen in a bundle of cascading blonde curls and bubbly giggles from her home in California. Just like any one of her sugar-syrup pop songs, her committedly upbeat nature offers an instant hit of feel-good energy.
Since her body positivity banger All About That Bass blasted her into the spotlight a decade ago, and it’s “every inch of you is perfect from the bottom to the top” lyrics went down as gospel for a new loud and proud generation, Trainor, 30, has ensured her spot as one of the most popular musicians in the world. She has 27.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and cemented a sub-genre of self-love anthems (“it’s my superpower,” she quips) with tracks including No, Lips Are Movin and Made You Look. There is a Grammy under her belt and a die-hard fanbase of girls and gays who gobble up her surefire, formulaic hits as and when they come. “Don’t I make it look easy, baby?” she bellows in one — and, in fact, she does.
For the most part, Trainor is celebrated for shouting about confidence, but her most recent album Timeless, out now, came from a place of despair. “The first song I wrote was a week after my C-section — I crawled down to the studio and started recording,” she says. It followed a taxing pregnancy, which included a miscarriage scare and a difficult birth to her second child, Barry, now almost one. He joins Riley, three, both with her husband of six years Daryl Sabara (who was Juni in Spy Kids).
“I hated my pregnancy — I hated it,” she says, her chipper tone now faded. “It was hard with gestational diabetes. I had to check my blood every day, be on a diet and it just hurts.” Giving birth “is the hardest thing you’ll ever go through in life. Women walk around every day and they’re riddled with trauma. Then [society is] like, ‘go take care of that baby’. And we should be OK with that? It’s not right.”
It is an issue she has spoken about before, and in 2023 she published a self-help book Dear Future Mama: A TMI Guide to Pregnancy, Birth, and Motherhood from Your Bestie. Now it’s received the Trainor music treatment. “When your body goes through that, that much, it’s like you start over from scratch again on how to love yourself,” she says. Sing-alongs about C-sections? It might not sound like a recipe for success, but you bet she makes it work.
Trainor credits her husband in helping her get through it. “He is king. On the second baby, he got up all night every night while I recovered from a crazy surgery.” Their greatest shared fear is of any harm coming to their door. “I’m terrified of stalkers,” Trainor whispers. “I loved Baby Reindeer. We also watch a lot of Dateline, so we’re terrified.” There is reason to worry. Stars from Harry Styles to Selena Gomez have endured years of harassment— and Trainor is certainly in the public eye, with 18 million followers on Instagram, and 18.5 million on TikTok. “I’ve not had any problems before, but my kids are so cute. Please, let’s not start now.”
TikTok helped her consolidate her fame with a younger audience, and by 2023, long reads in the New York Times unpacked “How TikTok brought Meghan Trainor back”. She watches as her songs regularly take on lives of their own. “One song called Better found its way to all these kids that were fighting cancer, and it became their theme song,” she says. “I found a new home [on TikTok]. I love it there. Miracles can happen.” The app is currently at risk of a ban in the US unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. “I just live in a delusion where that’s never gonna happen,” she says. “I’m like, everything’s fine.”
Trainor much prefers thinking about happier things, like Taylor Swift. “I look at her and think, how can I learn from her? She just figured it out. She’s worked her whole life for this, you know.” Her current chokehold on the industry is unprecedented. They’ve met a few times, but, Trainor concedes: “I’m not cool enough to be friends with Taylor Swift.”
Her liberal speech gives away her stance on the culture wars that hum away here and in the States. She is staunchly pro-trans rights, for one, and went as far as writing a new song, Forget How to Love, in support of the LGBTQIA+ community. “The trans community was getting destroyed while I was going through my C-section and I was like, what’s going on? I feel like we’re going backwards. Did you all forget how to love? Because all I’m seeing is hate.” It doesn’t feel coincidental Timeless was released as Pride Month began, either. “My gay audience means everything,” she says. “It’s getting scarier. I hope we can move forward like we were almost doing. I can’t even imagine how everyone feels now. Probably unsafe and scared.”
It’s the same for politics, where she focuses her energy on getting people to the ballots. “I try to get my voice out there and say ‘make sure you vote’. When I turned 18 I didn’t even know how to vote or how to register,” she says. The day before we speak, Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 counts related to falsifying business records. She can’t help but smirk. “I believe in the justice system. If you get in trouble they’re gonna catch you.” As for the outcome of the US election in November, Trainor seems worried. “It’s a wild world over here in America. Please vote, for the love of God.”
As with many people who have built personalities on being overly positive, Trainor struggles with her own mental health. It followed a series of breakdowns in her twenties. “I had panic disorder. All of a sudden my chemicals were way off. I was overworking myself. I crumbled, my voice crashed. I needed vocal surgery twice,” she says. “Then came my antidepressants and my therapy — which I have been doing for seven years now.”
Post-childbirth, though, she is feeling as happy in herself as ever. “I’m insecure in my body, I hate heels,” she says, but “this album is the first time that I was like, I look so hot.” A twinkle of that joy is bottled into each of her tracks. The world around Trainor might not be candyfloss and rainbows, but she knows that. It might just be why she keeps producing three-minute bursts of happiness as an antidote.
