Digital Cover: Jumping in at the Deep End with Bea and her Business

Listening to Bea and her Business is like sitting down with a friend who really gets you – and going deep over a glass of wine (or maybe a bottle). Part brutal honesty, part radical vulnerability, she’s not afraid to take up space – with big feelings, big ideas, and a big voice.

“I think that’s what I always wanted it to be – totally blunt, totally unfiltered, no whipped cream on top,” she confides over video call (and despite the lack of a glass of wine, this conversation is everything you’d hope for – deep, honest, and whole a lot of fun). “It’s just saying how I feel, what I think, with no apologies. I feel like everyone’s always so apologetic for the way that they feel when I don’t think they should be.”

Speaking to Bea Wheeler, AKA Bea and her Business, just a month before her major autumn headline tour – and her first time performing in the States. She’s about to enter the whirlwind of touring (“You’re all just in this delusional state… you’re running on zero sleep, you’re laughing at absolutely nothing”) and she’s excited to explore the “unchartered territory” of New York and Los Angeles.

Most of all, though, she’s looking forward to meeting fans, many of whom she knows only by their TikTok username. “Knowing that these TikTok numbers are real people and finally getting the chance to connect with them in a room is like nothing else,” she says, “You write a song and you don’t think anyone’s going to hear it and actually connect with it – you think they’re just going to hear the song and go, ‘that’s nice,’ and then move on. And then when you see people in real life, in real-time, experiencing the song, people are crying, people are holding a sign up to do with a song. You meet people after a show and they tell you how certain songs helped them move through certain struggles. It’s so powerful.”

The power of music is something she’s always been passionate about, but, she says, it’s different when it’s your music. “When you see what [a song] means to other people, it makes you think about your own music in different ways. The lyrics I write are really blunt and direct, and that makes songwriting very vulnerable for me because I’m literally blurting the words in my head onto a page. But seeing [people] come together and sing those words with me, and share those experiences – it makes me feel less lonely.”

It’s not surprising that Bea’s fans find so much to relate to in her music. On her 2024 EP, Me vs. Me, she’s centring complicated experiences – from being the only single one left in her friendship group, to worrying about being too loud and too much, to body-consciousness, and to feeling a bit existential after a party. “I’m terrified of myself / And the loser I might turn out to be / Party’s over and everybody’s leaving”, she sings on ‘Sunburnt Shoulders’. This is songwriting which isn’t afraid to talk about those more difficult feelings – embarrassment, anxiety, loneliness, having a debilitating crush and not knowing what to do about it – and it’s easy to imagine the crowds of young women at her shows this autumn, singing along with tears and smiles on their faces.

As its title suggests, the EP is very much focused on the self – rather than on a romantic muse or love interest. “The whole EP was about everything apart from love, mainly because I’ve been single for so bloody long!” she laughs, “But it forced me to think about how various other aspects of life made me feel. It’s liberating being able to write about things I’ve struggled with in the past, especially with a few years’ perspective.”

It’s an idea which is key to Bea’s creative process: “If I’m writing about the here and now, I don’t have any perspective” she says. “When I first started, I was writing at seventeen, but from the perspective of my fifteen-year-old self. You’re always older than the self you’re writing about. I found that helps me be able to convey emotion so directly, because you’re writing about something that you’ve lived and understood.”

And given her intensely personal approach to songwriting, is she ever tempted to (as they say on TikTok) ‘do it for the plot’ to gather material? “I’ve tried ‘doing it for the plot’ but I think in ‘doing it for the plot’ and writing about it, you actually need a lot of perspective on the ‘plot’. So ‘do it for the plot’ and then wait six months and you can write about it.” It’s not just a creative lesson, she says – it’s also a life lesson: “I think the consequences of the plot generally have a positive outcome – but they’re really not the one when you’re living in them and it feels like your life is over,” she laughs.

Raw experience isn’t all she needs to make music, though. “I read a lot of poetry while writing this EP. When you’re living somewhere alone and trying to find friends and figuring out what to do in a big city by yourself, it’s hard to do things for the plot! I started linking poems to past experiences, and that’s how I wrote my songs.”

If poetry isn’t cutting it when it comes to writer’s block, she has a foolproof solution: “Sometimes there’s been points where I’m getting nothing, and when I hit rock bottom I will go on a night out, or I’ll go down to the pub and chat absolute shit with my mates and not think about music. Just letting your hair down makes you realise you don’t have to force your brain to think of something!”

And when the muse does finally strike, she finds songwriting an incredibly healing process. She remembers, when she was younger, feeling uncomfortable sharing her thoughts and feelings with other people: “I used to feel like I was always being so imposing in conversations, that I wasn’t interesting enough or held enough value.” Now, however, music has become “a safe place, an island in the middle of the ocean keeping me warm and protected.” Writing the EP, she says, “made me feel a lot more confident, more assertive, and not afraid to say how I’m feeling.”

At the end of the day, she says, “Everything stems from the music.” When we talk about where she sees herself a year from now, her dreams are big – festivals, meeting fans, touring the world – but it all comes back to writing songs that resonate with people. “If the music’s good, everything else will follow. So my main thing is the music being up to scratch!” If her trajectory so far is anything to go by, that certainly won’t be a problem.