Ellie Goulding has been reflecting on how things have changed in the music industry since she got her start in 2010.
In a new interview with BBC Radio 4, the British pop star reflected on how the #MeToo movement ended up helping the music industry and effect change in how some male producers treat female singers.
“I definitely think the landscape has changed a bit, especially since the MeToo movement,” Goulding said, per People. “I think that was really, really important for people to keep speaking out about their individual stories because I know a lot was happening and just wasn’t being talked about.”
She later added, “Hearing so many other stories, similar stories from other female musicians and singers, I realized that I wasn’t alone in it at all. It wasn’t just me being particularly ‘friendly.’”
Goulding said she had experiences as a young adult where she “sort of normalized” the behaviors of men, brushing advances off as “maybe this is just a thing,” but later realized those behaviors weren’t ok.
“You know, when you go into a studio and afterwards the producer asks if you want to go for a drink. I’m quite a polite person, I don’t like letting people down,” she said. “I don’t like disappointing people. So I was like, ‘Yeah, sure, absolutely, go for a drink.’”
“And then and then it sort of somehow becomes like a romantic thing when it shouldn’t,” she continued. “You don’t want it to be a romantic thing, but it’s like there was always a slight feeling of discomfort when you walked into a studio and it was just one or two men writing or producing.”
Goulding explained that there was an “unspoken thing” that with male producers there was “almost like an expectation” to act a certain way around them. “It definitely wouldn’t happen now,” she said. “I mean, very rarely, because things have just really changed.”
Goulding spoke to Rolling Stone earlier this year about her album Higher Than Heaven and how one of her songs, “Better Man,” was inspired by the #MeToo movement and how things were “really turning around” in the industry because of it.
“I think when I wrote that song, I just needed to reclaim a power that maybe I’d lost at the beginning where I’d go into studios and it just didn’t feel safe,” she said. “You go into sort of survival mode. That’s probably the deepest one on the album. Everything else is an escape and it’s designed to dance and to feel free and to feel like anything is possible.”