Beyonce has been a successful and busy artist for a long time: Destiny’s Child formed (as Girl’s Tyme) before Beyonce was even a teenager. Not long after things started to take off, though, Beyonce suffered an injury that she thought would derail her singing career.
Beyoncé for @HarpersBazaarUS.
: Campbell Addy pic.twitter.com/9qYxdGDYuL
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) August 10, 2021
Beyonce is the subject of a new Harper’s Bazaar feature, and in it, after speaking about her introversion during her early childhood, she continued:
“I started taking voice lessons from an opera singer at nine. By 10, I had already recorded at least 50 or 60 songs in the recording studio. This was before Pro Tools, when you recorded to tape. I had my first vocal injury at 13 from singing in the studio for too many hours. We had just gotten our first record deal, and I was afraid I had developed nodules and destroyed my voice and that my career could be over. The doctors put me on vocal rest all summer and I was silent once again.”
She also talked about how seriously she took her music career as a teenager, saying, “I committed to always being a student and always being open to growth. No one in my school knew that I could sing because I barely spoke. My energy went into Destiny’s Child and the dream of us getting a record deal and becoming musicians. If something wasn’t helping me reach my goal, I decided to invest no time in it. I didn’t feel like I had time to ‘kiki’ or hang out. I sacrificed a lot of things and ran from any possible distraction. […] I knew I was given this amazing opportunity and felt like I had one shot. I refused to mess it up, but I had to give up a lot.”
Read the full feature here.