Meghan Trainor opened up to Chris Wallace in an emotional interview about her struggles with anxiety and vocal surgery, culminating with the veteran journalist reaching across the table, taking her hand and telling her to believe in herself.
The singer recounted on Friday’s “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” the major roadblocks she faced following the success of her hit single “All About That Bass,” from doors closing rather than opening to surgery that could have ended her career for good.
Between surgeries required to repair a vocal cord hemorrhage, Trainor says she began experiencing debilitating panic attacks. She began to tear up when Wallace rolled a clip of one that began during a live taping of the Grammy nominations she was co-hosting: “I remember losing vision. I was trying not to faint.”
Trainor recalled thinking to herself, “Just don’t pass out on TV right now.” As soon as the cameras were off, she began crying in front of Gayle King and others, sweating and admitting herself to the hospital before eventually learning she had an undiagnosed anxiety disorder.
“I’m a big asker for help,” Trainor told Wallace. “…I try to talk about it as much as I can even though it makes me uncomfortable and it brings up terrible memories… just in case someone out there is like, ‘Mom, that’s when I’m talking about.’”
At the end of her story, Wallace reached for Trainor’s hand in an emotional moment and told her she was “wonderful.”
“I just hope that, I would love it, if you truly fully, completely believed it yourself,” he said. “The only one who doesn’t think that is you, occasionally.”
“I know,” Trainor replied through tears, before joking: “Are you my dad?”
Before wrapping up their “therapy session,” Wallace reiterated his message to “Believe in you. Because you are very, very special and very talented. I can’t wait to see where it goes next.”
Throughout the half-hour sit-down, Trainor also spoke about the “superpower” for self-love anthems she discovered when she was 19 and realized how empowering “All About That Bass” was to her young fans. Among other topics, she discussed the body image issues she faced after giving birth to her son and the pressure to push through her vocal cord ailment when a major radio station executive threatened to blacklist her songs if she didn’t perform against doctors’ orders.
“I ended up hearing an old pre-recorded version of a show that I did before and listening to it on the whole plane ride and studying it and lip-syncing for the first time in my entire career,” she remembered. “And I was tearing up because I was terrified someone would find out I wasn’t singing.”
“I’m going to write a book about it one day and just say everything,” she told Wallace.
Trainor’s fifth major-label studio album “Takin’ It Back” was released Friday.
