Mae Muller has spoken of her upset after her performance at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest and how she carried on following the result.
Muller placed 25th out of 26 entries with ‘I Wrote A Song’ in May. She was the final act to perform on the evening and while her performance was well-received in the venue, it failed to inspire voters of either the jury or audience.
Now, Muller has reflected on how she felt following the disappointing result, which was worse than many had predicted.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, my life is over’,” she told BBC News. “But I knew I had to address it in my own way.”
Muller had recorded a particularly notable TikTok in the aftermath of Eurovision, with a caption of “When someone asks me how well I did at Eurovision”, which ends with her miming, “Ask me another question”.
She told the BBC it was an attempt to own her narrative after the contest. “I didn’t want it to be a ‘doom and gloom moment’ because I can’t deal with people pitying me. The second I did that, everyone laughed it off with me and it highlighted it’s not the end of the world.”
Muller recently released her debut album ‘Sorry I’m Late’, which was postponed by six months when it was announced she would be competing in Eurovision.
She explained that she thought the decision helped her in the long run – “After coming out of Eurovision, it meant I wasn’t twiddling my thumbs. I had a whole album to promote so we had to keep going”.
In a three-star review of ‘Sorry I’m Late’, NME wrote: “There’s a gripping album in ‘Sorry I’m Late’ beneath all the layers of gloss that dominate elsewhere. Yet being that Muller is trying to stand out among the current glut of young UK pop artists ploughing vaguely empowering anthems – Mimi Webb, Maisie Peters, Bellah Mae – it’s not clear what distinguishes her from the crowd.”