It’s been more than three years since Cher Lloyd burst onto the scene on the U.K. version of “The X Factor,” and since her fourth-place finish, she’s released her debut album and her hit single, “Want U Back.”
Yet, over the past year, Lloyd has taken a small step back to do some self-reflection, and in that time learned quite a lot about herself, and it turns out, she didn’t really like what she saw.
“I was a nightmare to work with,” Lloyd told MTV News of her time at the “X Factor.” “I was 16 years old and I wanted everything my way and what I didn’t understand that just starting out and being in the completion you have to earn your stripes and I didn’t earn my stripes and I honestly feel that I haven’t earned all of them yet, there’s still a lot of hard work to do. I don’t want to be the person people don’t want to meet… I never want to be remembered as the girl that came in and was rude to everyone and was an absolute diva even though she ain’t got her stripes yet.”
Lloyd admits she realized her faults after noticing that the media was paying more attention to her attitude than to her music. The British star is now hoping that with her new album, which she hopes to release in November, the focus shifts back to her music, and she’s kicking it off with her new single, “I Wish” featuring T.I. The single is a catchy, up-beat track that finds Lloyd asking a magic genie to grant her wishes to fix her flaws in order to get her crush to notice her.
“The message behind the song is basically that I have many insecurities and I just honestly feel like I’ve never met anyone and will not meet anyone that is not 100 percent happy with themselves. It’s never going to happen, but I think my main message is for you to be able to understand and embrace the fact that nobody’s perfect, but to be happy at the same time and not let that overwrite the fact that you need happiness in life and you shouldn’t be worrying about that your boobs aren’t big enough or your butt is big enough, get on with it.”
Her insecurities aren’t the only subject matter she tackles on her follow-up to her 2011 Sticks + Stones, Lloyd, who recently kicked off her I Wish Tour, admits that she’s revealing things that she never thought she would share with her fans.
“I honestly think it’s very honest and open, it took me a long time to understand that it’s OK to open up and not to keep this wall between me and everyone else because obviously being in the public eye you can embrace it or shut everything off, and that’s what I did before,” Lloyd said. “But it created a weird sheen around me and who I really was. This next record is just about me being me and letting people come in and letting people understand me as a person — and as an artist as well.”
