Lindsey Stirling on coronavirus crisis: 'This is going to be something that changes our generation'
Just a little over two weeks ago, it was business as usual for hip-hop violinist and YouTube sensation Lindsey Stirling. “We were preparing for a South American tour, and the coronavirus was starting to scare in a lot of parts of the world, but we felt like it was fine because it hadn't reached South America at all,” she tells Yahoo Entertainment/SiriusXM Volume. “We thought, ‘OK, we're good to go’ — even though we were kind of on pins and needles until I get on the flight.”
Stirling managed to squash her growing anxiety once she boarded the plane, but before she even reached her destination, the world had seemingly drastically changed below her. “We flew out to South America and we flew all day to get to Columbia through connecting flights and everything — and while we're halfway to Columbia in a flight, in the air we get these text messages that the whole tour is canceled,” she recalls. “And I was so confused, because everything [seemed] fine when we left. And then we land in Columbia and immediately had to go through customs, get our bags, and then just turn around and get on the flight [back home to Los Angeles]. It was the day that the travel bans were put in place for Europe, and I guess South America had just put a ban on any events over anywhere from a hundred to 500 people. So all our shows were automatically canceled. It was just a very displacing feeling.”
By the time Stirling had made it home, after not sleeping for 50 hours and being on flights for 19 hours straight, she returned to a transformed city. “All the toilet paper was gone. Everybody's storming the stores. And it was like, ‘What happened in the 24 hours I was gone?’ It was like L.A. flipped on its head. It was just very strange,” she says.
But Stirling stresses that canceling the tour was absolutely the responsible thing to do. “I'm just grateful that everybody's safe. No one wants to be part of the problem. We all just do your part to like sit back and try to help slow the curve of it,” she says. “So, it was definitely obviously the right choice, but it was very disappointing after practicing and planning for months. But this is happening to so many people now, in so many different ways.”
Fortunately, Stirling had her meditation practice to turn to during her stressful journey home. She had gotten into meditation as a way to calm her pre-show jitters, silence the voices of self-doubt in own head, and help with her battles against anorexia and depression — and she’d even just released a new song, “Lunar Lullaby,” recorded especially for the Calm app. “It was actually very hard for me to write a song that was so still, because I usually write music that's very busy and energy-filled. To write something that was so smooth and consistent was actually a little bit of a challenge for me artistically,” she says, adding with a chuckle that no, she does not meditate to her own music. “But I was really happy with how it came out.”
In a promo Stirling did earlier this year for Calm, she confessed that she used to feel the need to be busy all at times, and when she finally did have a rare lull in her schedule, she became restless and antsy. Those words take on new weight in an era of self-quarantine and enforced downtime.
“I think [the pandemic] has taught me a really valuable lesson about myself, because I've always thought I didn't like things still,” Stirling says. “You know, I like to work, I like to move. But I've realized I'm actually OK in the situation, with time stopping. Why is that? It’s because the entire world is stopped. And so I've realized it's not that I have a hard time slowing down and being still, it’s that I have a hard time with the self-judgment that comes along with it. It's that voice that tells me that you should not be doing that. And now that the entire world is slowing down, even though it's still like a little uncomfortable for me, I'm OK with it, because I'm not judging myself for it. …I think that this is going to be something that changes our generation and makes us all think a little bit differently about how we treat ourselves, and how we treat the world.”
Below, Stirling discusses her Calm collaboration and meditation experience.
Yahoo Entertainment: How has meditation helped you in general, even before the coronavirus crisis struck? Why did you start?
Lindsey Stirling: I do it before I go to onstage to combat that little bit of anxiety. I definitely get anxiety before I perform. Like, I want so badly to do the best I can. I don't want to let anybody down. So [meditating] takes me out of a mindset of fear of messing up and puts me into the mindset of giving. Because I think our mindsets, they become automatic. If you pay attention to them and if you put intention into your life, it allows you to say what you want to be and what you want your mindset to be, and it makes it a little more of a choice. But it takes a long time to change that thought process.
You’ve had a lot of success, so I bet your fans would be surprised that you grapple with this sort of impostor syndrome.
A lot of [musicians], and I'm going to speak about myself in this, a lot of us feel like it actually gets worse the more successful you get. It's a strange phenomenon. I've tried to figure out why that is, and I think that it comes from two sources. I feel like it partially comes from the fact that there's a lot more people [paying attention] now. Like, when I wrote my first album, I was just a girl in a room, with a violin. Suddenly releasing my second, third, fourth album, every time there's more people and I'm afraid I'm going to let them down or that maybe they are going to think, “Oh, she was a fluke. She doesn't really have it.” So there's a lot of fear of judgment, because there's a lot more to lose.
And secondly, I was actually having a conversation with Rachel Platten, who is a really good friend of mine. We talked about how once upon a time when no one else believed in me, I had to believe so strongly in myself — it was almost like a muscle that I worked, this muscle in my brain of like, “You got this, you can do this,” and really being my best cheerleader. It came from inside. …And then when other people start to tell you you're great, whether it's managers or fans or industry people, and you're being fed by this, suddenly you're not working that inner muscle as much. … So when the voices [of other people] stop talking, or when they turn and suddenly maybe they didn't love your last project, you don't have the strength inside anymore.
How did you get into meditation?
It all started when I realized years ago that I wanted to change. I was anorexic. I was extremely depressed. As I was going through therapy, I thought to myself, “OK, what else can I do? I want to train my mind to think in a different way. I hate the way that I treat myself in my mind.” … I used to be so cruel to myself all the time in my head. And when I realized that there was this inner dialogue of hatred towards my body and my mind and my myself, I was like, “Well, no wonder I dislike myself so strongly. No wonder I think I'm ugly. No wonder I think all these things about my body. It's because I'm constantly telling myself that.” So meditation was a way that I could put an intention of love, like self-love, and sit in it for a while, because it wasn't possible for me to believe at the time that I was beautiful or that I was smart or strong. …Eventually, those became the voices that I started to listen to.
Did your eating disorder issues begin after you got famous and felt that extra pressure you just talked about?
It actually existed before. I remember therapists would always try to dig and find out the source — and for me, there was no source. It was just that I am a perfectionist. I had all the characteristics, the personality traits, of someone who falls into anorexia, but it's not like I had a memory of some kid making fun of me and calling me fat. I had a wonderful childhood, good parents. It was just, “Well, this is something that I deal with, and I'm not sure why.” But I got it under control before I was in the public eye. I don't know how I would've handled everything if I hadn't first been able to like get under control and learn how to deal with it.
And that's why it's so hard for me to think that there are so many women out there who do not believe in themselves. There's this interesting thing that's happens to me when I'm onstage, like a few songs in, where I look out of the audience and literally start to get emotional. Even thinking about now, I get emotional, because as I look out at [the women in the crowd], and I see them as just pure humans of like joy and beauty. And I don't care who they are, where they're from, what they look like, tall or skinny or whatever. They all look so beautiful to me and I just think to myself, “I wish that everyone could see themselves through those eyes.” Every person is strong, every person is beautiful, every/ person is amazing. And the more you realize that, the more you exude it. I still have to remind myself of that, and I just wish that everybody could realize that that's what they are.
Have your fans told you that “Lunar Lullaby” has helped them?
I don't know about that song specifically… but I will say that I have heard from a lot of my fans through the years that for some reason, a lot of them find my music very calming, even though my music has EDM elements in it! I've been told by quite a few parents of autistic kids that my music helps calm down their kids. …Maybe it’s because there's no distraction of words, it's all melody. Maybe it’s something about the violin. But I've been told that by a lot of parents of autistic kids, and a lot of people say they listen to it through anxiety. … I don't think anything could make me feel better than to hear that my music helped someone through either mental health moments or just helps them kind of Zen. That's such a really impactful thing for someone to say to me.
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The above interview is taken from Lindsey Stirling’s appearance on the SiriusXM show “Volume West.” Audio of this conversation is available on demand via the SiriusXM app.
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