Mental health struggles are rough. They’re messy and unglamorous and isolating and - as Beth Cornell began to realise all-too-well in 2021 - not ideal terrain to be navigating when you’re on the cusp of breakthrough pop stardom.
Crack open a window into Beth’s brain around that time and you’d have found two sides at war with each other. One, the sparkling musician Litany who’d watched early single ‘Bedroom’ rack up tens of millions of streams; who’d recently had national treasure Joe Lycett direct her music video for ‘Uh Huh’ and was trying to push forward with that year’s ‘Adult Movies’ EP. The other, just Beth, heartbroken and locked down in London far away from her Harrogate home, struggling beyond belief but trying desperately not to admit it to herself for fear that everything she’d worked for would come crumbling down.
“From the minute I started singing in front of people, I wanted to be - for lack of a better word - a pop star. I get no bigger buzz from doing it, but the pressure that comes from that is mental. You have to pretend you’re always good - you’re more than good; you’re this beacon of positivity,” she says. “I was forcing myself to stay in London because my gut was telling me it was the right thing to do for my career but it got really dark for a minute. I was crying down the phone every day to my parents and eating myself into oblivion. I didn’t care if I lived or died. I thought it was a blip and everyone was going through it because of the pandemic - what makes me so special? But, in the end, they all-but forced me to come back home. I didn’t write music for about a year. I did therapy. I went onto some strong antidepressants. I needed time to heal and to rekindle my love for music because I'd lost every sense of who I was completely.”
