Ella Eyre has said that her grief over her father’s death caught up with her after delaying the process by throwing herself into work.
The pop star said that she experienced anxiety but had struggled to explain how she was feeling, and that when people asked her about her father, who died in 2017, she was not able to answer “very well”.
The 25-year-old singer-songwriter told ITV’s Loose Women: “After my dad died, I threw myself back into work and I remember at the time I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s really good, I’ve thrown myself into work, I’m distracted, I’m not really thinking about it, so it’s been really good for me’.
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“And then actually, a year later… it was completely delaying it, so it caught up with me. I was getting really anxious.
“I’d never experienced these types of feelings before and I didn’t know how to explain them.”
Eyre, known for hits including Waiting All Night and Just Got Paid, said that “it was something that crept up on me”.
“Being in music has its trials and tribulations and I think it’s always at a hundred (mph) at all times and so I started to realise I wasn’t coping as well as I usually would, and I’ve been doing music since I was 16,” she said.
She said that she would feel “cloudy” and “tense”, adding: “I think it was just realising that every time someone asked me about my dad, just a casual question about what he was like, I just wouldn’t be able to answer it very well and then I thought, ‘Actually, I should probably address that’.
“Losing a parent is something you’re never prepared for, really.”
Eyre said that, to cope with the grief, she “took a step back” from making and releasing music and spent as much time as possible with friends.
The Brit Award-winner said that, having been in the music industry since the age of 16, she frequently missed important events, so wanted to “reconnect with what was going on and what essentially made me who I was”.
“It was a tense time, but I learnt so much about myself,” she added.
Eyre also revealed that she recently visited Jamaica, where her father lived, and that those close to her were unsure how she would cope with the trip.
But she said: “I went back again in January to where my dad was from and met loads of family members and people he’d grown up with.
“I didn’t know how much I needed it.”