“Every time life felt too loud, I’d disappear into the music room”
BY HEIDI BOUALILI, IMAGE BY DANIEL DE LA BASTIDE
Since I was a kid, I’ve always felt everything deeply. I was loud, confident, emotional (the kid with the big gob who never really shut up). I had so many feelings and no idea what to do with them, so I started turning them into songs. Through every phase, every obsession and hyper-fixation from football to karate, scooting, skating, music was the one thing that never left me. It’s the one thing that always stayed.
Music has been part of me for as long as I can remember. I wrote my first song when I was six years old after my grandad passed away. I carried notebooks around everywhere, constantly writing. I was obsessed with Camp Rock. I even made my own little notebook like Mitchie’s and kept it hidden under my bed exactly like she did. At first, I’d fill it with lyrics from the film, but eventually I started adding my own. I fell in love with storytelling. With performing. With the feeling that a song could say the things I didn’t know how to say out loud.
As I got older, I wanted to learn instruments too. I had about one drum lesson before deciding I hated being told what to do and forced to play boring songs, so I started teaching myself guitar and piano at home instead.
Growing up in Southend-on-Sea, I was the loud kid with short hair who people constantly asked, “Are you a boy or a girl?” before I even properly understood why they were asking. I looked different, acted different and felt different.Weirdly, though, when I was younger, I didn’t really mind it. I actually thought being different was cool.
School wasn’t always easy. I got a lot of stick for being an overweight girl with ridiculously short hair, and eventually that built up into one particular fight. I wasn’t someone who usually fought, but I remember a teacher pulling me out of it, and that teacher happened to be the music teacher. From that moment on, he completely took me under his wing. I got put intothe top set music and was given the chance to take an instrument home from school until Year Nine. I’ll never forget my mum’s face when I walked through the front door holding a saxophone. Every time life felt too loud, I’d disappear into the music room.
Throughout high school, I felt misunderstood, like I never fully fit anywhere, so I started posting videos of myself singing and rapping online. For the first time, people connected with what I was doing. I was writing about loneliness, bullying and everything I was experiencing in real time and suddenly people were listening.
I remember posting a song about bullying with my friend when I was about 12 or 13. We uploaded it to Facebook, and by the next morning, it had 12,000 views. At that age, I genuinely thought, “Right then, that’s it, I’m famous.” I definitely wasn’t, but it showed me how powerful music and social media could be. I’d taken something painful and turned it into something that made other people feel less alone.
From singing covers to writing bars over Eminem and Tupac beats, I kept posting, kept writing and kept performingwherever I could. By 17, I was busking on the streets of Southend and playing every open mic I could find. My mates and I would busk all day and head straight to open mics at night. That was when I knew this wasn’t just a hobby anymore. I wanted to spend my life doing this.
So I dropped out of sixth form and moved to London to study music.
Suddenly, the world felt massive. For the first time, I was surrounded by people who were like me, creative, expressive, obsessed with music. The only issue was that younger me had refused proper lessons, so I was now surrounded by insanely talented instrumentalists while I was still teaching myself guitar as I went along.
Then lockdown hit.
Honestly, I was buzzing at first because I thought, “Perfect. Three weeks to sit inside and play guitar every day so I can catch up.” Obviously, three weeks became a lot longer, but for me, that just meant more time making music. I started posting videos constantly and sharing my journey online. Celebrities and musicians were live-streaming every day out of boredom, so I started jumping into Instagram Lives asking, “Can I sing for you?”
Somehow, it actually worked.
I ended up singing my original songs live to artists and people I’d looked up to for years, including Noah Kahan, Tom Grennan, Lucy Spraggan, Stefflon Don and Skai Jackson. During that time, I gained thousands of followers and really started taking music seriously.
Coming out of lockdown, I began releasing music independently. A few hours after dropping my first single, it hit number 30 on the iTunes charts, sitting right next to Ed Sheeran. My next release charted in the R&B charts beside Stevie Wonder. Everything started moving quickly, and truthfully, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t have a manager. I just kept going. It was hard, and after a while, I started to feel a bit stuck.
After years of juggling three jobs alongside music, I hit a wall. All my friends had graduated from university while I still felt stuck in the same cycle, gigging wherever I could and trying to survive. I genuinely thought maybe this was it.
Then two weeks later, I posted a video on TikTok and overnight, everything changed.
Within weeks I’d signed my first record deal, had one of my songs featured on Love Island and was preparing to release the music that would completely change my life.
Since then, everything has continued to snowball. Since then, I have been featured as Jack Saunders’ Next Wave Featured Artist on BBC Radio 1, appeared on Sky News and been on my first UK support tour. Most importantly, over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out who I am and how I want to share my music in the rawest, most honest way possible. My debut project, What I Didn’t Know Then, feels like the truest version of me. It’s messy, emotional, vulnerable and real.
Music has never just been a career to me. It’s the thing that kept me sane. The thing that saved me over and over again. From being that misunderstood kid, to the rowdy teenager who was fearless. To the anxious adult who was just trying to figure it out. From falling in love to heartbreak. My songs have soundtracked it all.
I write exactly how I feel, the good, the bad and everything in between. And the fact that people connect with it still blows my mind. Whenever someone tells me they relate to one of my songs, it reminds me that none of us is as alone as we think we are. That’s the whole reason I do this.
Heidi Boualili’s album What I Didn’t Know Then is out on 27 May.
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