Lindsay Ell Reveals How She Was Told She’s ‘Not Country Enough

Nashville holds a very tight standard for what is or isn’t country. Sure, they often let a lot of junk slide through the cracks. Jason Aldean types clumsily cramming his bad rapping into songs. A singer like Keith Urban end up foregoing the twang completely for a pop sheen. Regardless, the country music executives get very particular about who does or doesn’t make it within their industry. Lindsay Ell knows this thorny opposition well. She tries to chase her dreams in country and gets firm rejection.

Recently, singer Lindsay Ell speaks with PEOPLE Magazine ahead of her upcoming EP Love Myself on October 25th. There, she retells a lot of her journey, the rough times that she would often wear as a badge of pride. She figures all the bad she went through would prove that she can never be down for too long.

Singer Lindsay Ell Details How People Would Tell Her ‘She’s Not Country Enough’

However, now, Lindsay finds peace in not embracing the bad moments in the past. “I saw everything I’ve been through like surviving sexual assault and eating disorders and being through countless bad relationships — don’t even get me started — I would just view them as badges that I was wearing to be like, ‘OK, world hit me. I can take it,'” the singer explains. “But I think that that kind of attitude almost encourages the chaos. It almost welcomes more of it. And [now] I’m like, ‘I don’t think life needs to be lived like that.'”

Still, Lindsay remembers her eager dream to be a country singer. Moreover, she recalls her team frequently discouraging her from trying. Eventually, she sheds the need to fit in with the genre’s confines and embraces who she is fully. “I had a whole team that was just like, ‘Lindsay you’re not country enough. You’re not country enough. You’re not country enough.’ And so I tried to fit myself in, but I’m like, ‘I don’t even like beer. Why should I write songs about it? I don’t even like it,'” she recalls.