The TikTok star also explains why she won’t use the social media platform to market ‘A Letter to Me.’ «I want to be respected,» she says.
Dixie D’Amelio, the 20-year-old TikTok powerhouse turned pop singer, manages to experiment with ease on her debut album, “A Letter to Me,” released June 10. On the 15-track album, the Norwalk, Conn. native who bills herself as simply as Dixie is more self-aware than ever. She skips across genres and moods, showing off her vocal range and delving into tough subjects on ballads including “Model,” where she asks: “Tell me, is it worth it being perfect? When we’re all just gonna die?”
“With everything that I was putting out before, I definitely did not have the confidence to back myself up – I didn’t believe in myself at all,” says Dixie, who sat down with Variety over Zoom a day before her album release party performance. Although she still deals with pre-show jitters, it’s apparent she’s grown past — and now playfully disavows — some of her older tunes and performances. Nonetheless, she’s quick to acknowledge and shower those moments with love. She recounts her first live performance at the Troubador in Los Angeles in November 2021 and the moments in rehearsals where it “took a while to learn to take my hands out of my pockets.” It took time to remember other popstar necessities, like keeping the mic to her lips while simultaneously delivering a clean dance number. “I have so much love for all of the songs I’m singing now, and that just obviously makes everything so much more fun,” says Dixie.
“[In the past], I’ve had to perform with the thought in my head that ‘nobody likes the song I’m singing,’ and it doesn’t make for the best performance but now when I go through the entirety of my set – it’s fun the entire time.”
Hailing from TikTok’s “First Family,” as many have grown to call them (younger sister Charli and parents, Heidi and Marc D’Amelio), Dixie currently boasts 25 million followers on Instagram and an additional 57.3 million on TikTok. In 2020, she landed a record deal with L.A. Reid’s HitCo Entertainment and joined Saint JHN and Outkast’s Big Boi on the label’s roster. Reid makes an appearance on her family’s reality show on Hulu, “The D’Amelio Show,” (which just wrapped its second season of filming), as one plotline is dedicated to Dixie finding her singing confidence and receiving musical guidance from the label head, her family and other mentors.
