Lindsay Ell Was Told She's 'Not Country Enough' for Years. Why She Now Finally Feels 'Free' (Exclusive)
The singer-songwriter's latest song 'Story I Tell Myself' is out Friday ahead of her upcoming EP later this month
Lindsay Ell has a really high pain tolerance — just ask.
Over French fries at a New York City cafe, PEOPLE does just that, and Ell says she's relieved to no longer be a martyr in toxic relationships. Instead, she's a proud card-carrying member of the self-love club, which helped inspired her upcoming EP Love Myself, out Oct. 25.
"I saw everything I've been through like surviving sexual assault and eating disorders and being through countless bad relationships — don't even get me started — I would just view them as badges that I was wearing to be like, 'OK, world hit me. I can take it,'" she tells PEOPLE. "But I think that that kind of attitude almost encourages the chaos. It almost welcomes more of it. And [now] I'm like, 'I don't think life needs to be lived like that.'"
Related: Lindsay Ell Opens Up About Her Past Breakups: They 'Teach Us What We Don't Want'
Ell, who moved from Canada to Nashville to chase her country music dreams 15 years ago (and in 2022, officially became an American citizen) says she spent so much of her early career "trying to fit myself into a box and follow the rules."
It wasn't enough.
"I had a whole team that was just like, 'Lindsay you're not country enough. You're not country enough. You're not country enough.' And so I tried to fit myself in, but I'm like, 'I don't even like beer. Why should I write songs about it? I don't even like it,'" Ell recalls.
With her latest song Story I Tell Myself — out Friday, Oct. 4 — and upcoming EP Love Myself, Ell is done contorting herself into someone else's image — both sonically and otherwise — and she's over the "confined space" of the country music genre, too.
"This project feels so liberating and so free, like I'm finally connecting head and heart," she says. "It's so strange because I feel like country as a tent, the tent is getting bigger! We're welcoming people like Zach Bryan and Noah Kahan. I know that you need a genre to file something in a library on a platform, but beyond that, I don't think genre matters. I know that fans don't care. They just want a song that they resonate with and an artist that they can believe in."
In 2023, Ell shared on Instagram that she'd been diagnosed with an eating disorder, telling PEOPLE at the time that it had taken her a while "to come to terms with the fact that I may have a problem that needs to be addressed."
Now, the "Right on Time" singer says she's doing better than ever before.
"I have confidence in who I am without being scared what everybody is going to think about me. That really ran my life for a long, long time," she says. "And for the first time in my life, I really do love myself and my body. I have not been able to say that for... all of my life really, except the last couple of years when I've really been working on that."
Ell is also a sexual assault survivor, and music has proved to be instrumental in not only her own healing journey, but that of fellow survivors, too.
"After I came out with my sexual assault, and I wrote a song called "Make You" about it, I got thousands and thousands of DMs from fans being like, 'Thank you for writing this song. You've inspired me to tell my story to my family that I never have.' Or 'you've inspired me to go find a therapist' or 'you've inspired me to go get help,'" she shares.
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"The stigma of sexual assault or even eating disorders means people think of those things as dirty things to talk about or ugly things to talk about. And it's like, 'OK, how can we normalize that conversation so that it relieves a lot of the stigma and so that other people going through it feel more open to share their story or reach out and get help?'" Ell says.
With her music and her Make You Movement, which she describes as a "foundation arm" that she's able to fundraise for different organizations under, Ell hopes to shine a light on survivors and their journeys to help remind them just how strong they really are.
"That's one of my main goals right now," she says. "I've always wanted to use my platform to give back and to do good."
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