Elle King, country/pop singer, songwriter and actress, seems to have lived more than a lifetime at only 35 years of age. The daughter of comedian/Saturday Night Live alum Rob Schneider and model London King, she chose to take her mother’s maiden name for show business to differentiate from her famous dad.
Elle King’s life has been played out in public. Her up-and-down relationship with her dad, her divorce, the birth of her son Lucky Levi Tooker in 2021, struggles with depression, alcohol, and stage fright have all been well publicized. She credits Lucky as her greatest achievement.
She made her acting debut at 16 in her dad’s 1999 film Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. That led to other on-screen work but Elle King’s true love is music, which she discovered at the age of 13 when she started playing guitar. Her first top 10 single, “Ex’s & Oh’s,” from the 2015 debut album, Love Stuff, earned two Grammy Award nominations.
Her 2021 duet with Miranda Lambert on “Drunk (And I Don’t Want to Go Home)” went platinum and she teamed up with Dierks Bentley on two hits, “Different For Girls” (2016) and “Worth A Shot” (2022).
She dropped “Baby Daddy’s Weekend” (April 2024), a feel-good summer gem, and is currently on her Baby Daddy’s Weekend Tour, which lands at The Paramount, recently sold to LiveNation, on Oct. 10.
Elle King took a break from her busy tour schedule to give this exclusive interview.
How did you originally team up with Miranda Lambert?
About four years ago, I was on a tour with her. Both of her openers were females. She had this great idea to have all the females on this tour sing Fooled Around Fell in Love. It was an amazing experience and we won an Academy of Country Music (ACM) award for it.
At the end of the tour, I was terrified, but I sent her a text asking if she would team up on my song “Drunk” that I had been sitting on for like eight years. That song really taught me a lot about patience and just let things surprise you. She agreed to it and it was a fun ride. We broke a record with that song and got a Grammy nomination.
You’ve said the popularity of “Ex’s & Oh’s” was a great surprise to you. Why is that?
I feel like I didn’t have confidence in myself yet. I was still such a new artist with lots of different genre-bending influences and sounds. I didn’t know that song was going to be a massive carving into the stone of my career. That song exploded and changed my life.
You credit Dierks Bentley with introducing you to country music, which changed your musical direction. How did that happen?
Even though I’ve always written country songs and I got signed because of a country song, I didn’t necessarily put rock and pop together with country. Now I think they’re more blended, but back then for me it was super cut and dry. I didn’t know much about modern country music and I never experienced the fans.
Dierks introduced me to modern country fans and that was such an incredible game-changer. I felt they were really accepting and open with me. I kept hearing all this stuff about it being a family and then I felt it. It was a life-changing experience and I’ve been pretty much in country ever since. I think country music is the new pop.
What advice can you share with others working through parental difficulties?
I think you must build a strong foundation and get therapy! When you work on yourself, it’s so much easier to accept others, even with their faults. It’s easy to hold on to a hurt for the rest of your life. Letting go is so much harder because that means you’re moving on, and that can be tricky for a lot of people.
Is there something that you are deliberately doing in raising your son that is a direct result of the way you were raised?
I make sure that my son is my number one priority at all times. So if I’m onstage and my son needs me, I’ll walk offstage, I’ll bring him onstage and give him a hug. He’ll usually stay throughout the set, depending on the time zone, but he tours with me everywhere. He loves to stay through “Ex’s & Oh’s,” which is around my fouth or fifth song. Sometimes he doesn’t want to leave, so I’ll go over to the side of the stage, give him a kiss and say goodnight. That wasn’t always the case with me. I was never the number one priority and I need my son to know that he comes first.
You’ve been open about your stage fright. Have you learned to handle it in a healthy way?
Yeah, all my shows have been sober. I had to get over the hump of that and then they ended up becoming the best shows I’ve ever played. These crutches we lean on are a weird safety [net] that’s actually a hindrance. Sometimes you just have to jump and hope that you land. I think experience helps too.
In an interview that you did with your dad in 2018, you said, “I don’t want chaos in my life.” What steps have you taken to ensure that outcome?
I live in Nashville now which is a relatively slow-paced life. I definitely don’t have a farm anymore. That was a lot of work. I think when you have a baby, it forces you to make choices that are good for your family and good for your mental well-being. And that’s kind of where I’m at right now.
Those interested in seeing Elle King on Thursday can visit ParamountNY.com.
