Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | April 24, 2026
Meghan Trainor released her newest album this week. Toy With Me is her seventh studio release, and one she has described as her "most honest and fearless" work to date. She described wanting listeners to feel "safe" and able to "dance and be happy" while listening to it. For those eager to get the chance to dance with her in-person, their hopes were scuppered when, last week, Trainor announced the cancellation of her 33-date tour. Trainor claimed that the stress of balancing a new album release and the arrival of her third child was too much. It was an excuse few believed, especially after we saw just how poorly the tour was selling. At one point, you could buy $30 tickets on Groupon.
Trainor is one of those singers who nobody seems to admit to being a fan of. Indeed, it seems to be more common to see people mocking her work or claiming it's for nobody. But it obviously must be for someone. You don't get to seven studio albums under a major record label without some degree of committed fandom. Still, that criticism, as glib as it is, does hit at something intriguing about not just Trainor but the middle of the pack of pop stardom. How do you endure when deemed to be too uncool to keep up with the pack? What is the secret to survival in a ruthlessly cutthroat industry? Trainor has outlasted many of her contemporaries. She's a Grammy winner. Jimmy Fallon loves her. Clearly, she knows something that we don't.
When Trainor burst onto the scene in 2014 with "All About That Bass", a ruthless doo-wop earworm of kitschy body positivity, it immediately became a Marmite song. You either loved it or thought it was torture. Either way, you couldn't get it out of your head. The Discourse it inspired was, of course, loaded and a bit too much. But it did single Trainor out in an industry where the default mode for a pop diva was grandeur, sex, and, yes, thinness. In retrospect, it is utterly bananas that Meghan was forced to be the representative for bigger girls given that she was still pretty slim, but fatphobia has never played by consistent rules, and the endless conversations around her body proved to be tedious and infantilising. Whether she wanted it or not, Trainor's music was seen as the alternative to the raunch of someone like Katy Perry (who wasn't even all that sexed up and it read more as tacky, but that's another conversation.)
A lot of Trainor's music makes more sense when you realise she started out as a songwriter for other artists. She co-wrote "Ain't Your Mama" for Jennifer Lopez, did some country songs for people like Hunter Hayes, and worked on the Disney-era debut album of Sabrina Carpenter. There's a malleability to her songwriting that feels well suited to shopping a number around for whatever artist wants or needs it. some Trainor-sung songs seem like they were intended for singers with a certain brand, a kind of wit or irony that Trainor herself just doesn't possess. "Dear Future Husband" is easily her worst song, a truly smarmy ode to treating your perspective spouse like crap, but it would also work way better if sung by a musician who can deliver a joke. The same goes with "Made You Look", which desperately cries out for something truly camp.
Meghan Trainor is very earnest, like a motivational quote on a sign in your aunt's kitchen. There's a safeness to her music and aesthetic that feels designed to most appeal to people a good decade or so older than Trainor herself, but also a decade younger. That's a solid marketing strategy. After all, teen girls and their mums are a mighty spending demographic. Videos of Trainor's concerts show a lot of younger listeners having an absolute blast, and I get it. But one wonders if Trainor is satisfied with that. In recent albums, she's tried to lean into a kind of queer-friendly drag-style rhetoric, singing about being mother and the like. It worked on social media, where TikTok seemed to embrace the shift, but it didn't take off like her "up with people" white doo-wop numbers. At least that is a field she has to herself. Whenever she tried to infringe on similar territory to one of her contemporaries (one of her newest songs sounds strikingly like a Tate McRae number), it fell flat.
We also can't talk about Trainor without talking about her changing appearance. She recently talked about using weight loss drugs and receiving a breast augmentation. In her most recent music video, where she dons ballet chic, she looks especially skinny. A lot of people had opinions on the matter. No, it wasn't "treason" or whatever for Trainor to go on weight loss drugs and get a boob job. You get one body in this cursed life and you can decorate it as you please. The "All About That Bass" girl can choose to be all treble, and who would blame her after a decade of being derided as too fat to live by the press and internet alike? I actually have more of a problem with her turning her plastic surgery into a sponcon opportunity, a move I found to be so dystopian that I'm stunned it wasn't talked about more at the time.
Still, when you can't even sing your most famous song anymore without changing the lyrics ("Yeah I think it's clear, I've got some new boobs"), people notice that. Songs of self-empowerment and loving yourself just as you are take on a less joyous tone when the performer has reshaped herself to look and sound just like everyone else. And that gets to the heart of the current Meghan Trainor problem: her sound, her look, her entire vibe is now a weak replica of about ten other women in the same space, and they all do it better than her. We have Tate McRae, Addison Rae, Bebe Rexha, Ava Max, and Zara Larsson. They all do this kind of self-possessed, high-heeled, HBIC brashness better. When Trainor sings "Rich Man", paying homage to the famous Cher quote, her brags about calling the bags under her eyes Chanel and Dior are too trite to land as an effective gag with her delivery. I don't buy her as a diva. She's way too insecure for that.
Meghan Trainor is a married mother of three who does an overshare podcast, appears in ads for laundry detergent, and sings Christmas duets with Jimmy Fallon. She wants to age up her image while keeping up with modern pop trends but feels stuck in the retro old/young appeal of what made her famous. Some pop stars are happy with their place in the pecking order while others want to be mega-idols. Meghan is the latter, but I don't see her rising to those early heights ever again. At least, I don't imagine it happening unless she finds a way to blend the qualities her fans love about her with something fresh that can appeal to a new demographic. As it is, she feels adrift, torn between a gimmick that no longer works and a homogenous future of assembly line pop bops. Until then, the prospect of another arena tour feels oh so far away.
