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).
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