Madison Beer on The Spinnin Tour, Fan Connections, and Ignoring Naysayers

Even in a crowd, Madison Beer can point out her fans by name. “I’m not even kidding,” she says. “There’s Ryan. That’s Laura. That’s Luciana. That’s Max. Who else is out there? I can’t even see. That’s Tori. That’s Amanda.” We’re sitting on a bus outside the JBL Store in Soho, New York City. It’s the day after her show at Radio City Music Hall for her Spinnin Tour, and you can bet Ryan, Laura, Luciana, and everyone else showed up then, just like they showed up today.

Having grown up in Jericho on Long Island, performing at an iconic venue like Radio City was more than just a career milestone for Madison Beer; it was also her hometown show. “It feels ridiculous. I actually can’t believe that it happened. I can’t believe I made it through the whole show,” she tells Teen Vogue, struggling to hide her excitement. “I was like, ‘It’s going well. I’m doing it.’ I ran off stage halfway through the show during [my song] ‘Reckless,’ and I just was in disbelief that it was going as good as it did and I wasn’t messing things up.”

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Supporting the release of her sophomore studio album, Silence Between Songs, Beer kicked off The Spinnin Tour back in February in Sweden, taking the show across Europe first before heading stateside in late April. Since then, she has completed the bulk of her 56-date world tour, officially wrapping up the North American leg this June, with the last stops in Asia resuming in August. The tour is going to be the thing that colors her year, and she’s preparing for the remainder of it as such. Her tour bus doesn’t have room for a giant JBL Party Box speaker, but it’s got Clips hanging everywhere, and she’s using them to listen to something you are also probably bumping: the new Billie Eilish record.

“My headphones are essential for me,” Beer explains. “The bus can be really loud when it’s moving [so I need] music. I like to have music around me all the time, anywhere that I can.”

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Some might consider Madison Beer new to the scene, but she has had a long career since being discovered by Justin Bieber through her YouTube videos at age 12. The Spinnin Tour is Beer’s third concert tour to date, and she has no plans to stop anytime soon. However, Beer’s career is also long in the sense that it’s been arduous.

Now 25, she’s been working for half of her life, and it has come at a cost. Becoming an adult in front of an audience, especially as a young girl, opens the floor for all kinds of exploitation, from leaked photos to negative scrutiny, all during an already vulnerable stage of life.

Beer has spoken at length in interviews and in her memoir, The Half of It, about how it has shaped her. “So much of my life and my story has been blurbs [to the public,] and people have pieced together what they think has been the reality,” she says about the memoir.

Even then, she heard critiques about how she was too young to have published a memoir. “It was funny seeing a lot of people be like, ‘She’s writing a memoir at 24 years old.’ I was like, ‘It’s not an autobiography, it’s just a blurb of the time.’”

Ultimately, Beer is happy the book found its crowd. “I think that it was received great,” she says. “My fans love it. I mean, they come up to me all the time, and they’re just like, ‘Your book helped me so much.’ I actually got a gift from a fan a couple of days ago that was my book, but it was each chapter of my book with her responses. It was so unbelievable. I can’t even believe that somebody wrote the entire thing [by hand]. That’s why I do this.”

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Beer’s life in the public eye caused her a lot of anguish, but it has also softened her. At a meet-and-greet at the Radio City show the night before JBL Fest 2024, she met a 12-year-old fan, the same age that Beer was when she got signed and moved to Los Angeles.

“Now that I’ve grown up in so many ways mentally and emotionally, meeting someone who was my age when I started was just shocking,” she tells Teen Vogue. “[The fan] was so young, and I don’t know, it was hard to wrap my head around the fact that I’ve been doing that for this long. [I’m] obviously happy now, but it did make me a little bit sad and protective, and I was just like, ‘Oh my goodness, you’re a child. And it was kind of surreal to see someone that young.”

Beer’s eyes kept finding this fan throughout the show. She recalls all the feelings she’s felt in the time between 12 and now. The scrutiny was something even her closest family and friends couldn’t quite relate to. She was angry until one day, she wasn’t anymore.

“I was very, I would say maybe spiteful, and I harbored a lot of animosity for many people around me,” she says. “I think I was born a gentle, kind, and loving person, and I felt like I got poisoned through the years. And then it turned into this anger like, ‘How dare people change me and make me jaded and make my open heart cold?’ And then I realized, ‘You know what? After everything, after getting bullied and tormented online and years of this and that and whatever, no one can really take away my heart being soft and open to people.'”

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Perhaps it’s because her fans are so generous with their sympathy for Beer’s challenges that she feels such a strong pull toward them. It may be why she’s able to consider happiness and gentleness for herself again.

“I feel like I’ve gotten good at acknowledging the hard times and saying that, yeah, I have gone through certain things that have been really difficult and whatever,” Beer explains. “But I was also signed by the biggest artist in the world, got my dreams come true when I was 12 years old. I moved to Los Angeles. I was given such an incredible platform and stepping stool to follow my dreams, and there are so many happy moments and so many things that I have to be able to look back on and be grateful for. It’s definitely not all just sad. But I think talking about that stuff tends to lean a little bit more not happy or nostalgic, because I feel like I want to shed a light on the reality of what it was like to grow up in such a weird way. I think that sometimes people, especially in some sort of spotlight, try to glaze over everything and make everything [look like it] was so amazing. I want to be honest with people. I feel like that’s why I have such a strong connection with [my fans], because I am honest with them, and I want them to know that it’s not all just sunshine and rainbows.”

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The story of Beer’s life does not feel complete without her fans’ generosity. There’s always going to be a natural distance between fan and artist, and it feels like Beer means it when she tries to take steps toward them. “It’s like we just want to make each other feel seen and heard,” she says, “I feel so grateful that that’s the way that our relationship has flowed now.”

“I can proudly say that my soft, open heart is back and beating louder than ever, and it feels really good,” she continues. “People can feel that. I wouldn’t want to do this if I wasn’t happy, and I’ve told [my fans] that. I’ve been like, ‘As much as I love you guys, I wouldn’t do this if I felt the way I did four years ago.’ I also try to validate my younger self’s emotions and feelings where I’m like, ‘You went through a lot, and you have every right to have been off and angry at people for it.’ But I don’t believe in being angry at people forever.”

Now, Beer’s focus is not on convincing people who don’t get it anymore. “I’m trying to every year just be more and more at peace with everything and care less and less what TikTok has to say about me,” she says. “I care about the people who show up to things like this and have supported me and have stood by me and that know me and that appreciate me and like me. Why am I going to spend the rest of my life trying to get people who have decided they don’t like me to like me? Don’t like me, that’s okay. I’ll survive. But I’m grateful for the people that do.”