Mae Muller: Everything you need to know about the UK’s Eurovision 2023 entry

Mae Muller was announced today as the UK’s entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, which will be hosted in Liverpool in May. 

The 25-year-old singer will perform with the track ‘I Wrote A Song’ following a search by the BBC and global management company TaP Music. The news was confirmed by Zoe Ball and Rylan Clark on the BBC Radio 2 Breakfast Show this morning, Thursday March 9.

She is a singer-songwriter who received mainstream attention after releasing the single Better Days  in 2021. The Single was a collaboration with Swedish music collective NEIKED and American rapper Polo G, and went on to chart in the top 40 in both the United Kingdom and United States.

She said to Golden Plectrum: “It was my claim to fame for a long time.”

Mae was born Holly Mae Muller on 26 August 1997, Kentish Town, London.

The UK last triumphed at the contest in 1997 with Katrina And The Waves topping the leaderboard with their anthem Love Shine A Light in Dublin. The song was the highest-scoring UK entry at that time before being overtaken by Ryder with Space Man in 2022. That win will seem distant to Muller, who was born the same year, but she will still be hoping to mirror that success at the Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool this year.

Her parents separated when she was six, but Mae stayed in London with her mum, a costume designer. Luckily, her aunt is a music video director, and Muller used to spend afternoons as a runner for artists like Labrinth, for whom she once made tea in a polystyrene cup.

She started writing her own music at 8-years-old. Mae is the middle child, and a self confessed attention seeker – she told the Private Parts podcast: 

“I have been an attention seeker since I was two… every Christmas or family thing, I was like, ‘I want to put on a show! Everyone sit down, I wanna sing for you! 

“It sounds so silly but I just loved music and I felt I loved music more than anybody else.”

She went on to attend Fine Arts College, in Belsize Park. As a teen Mae decided to leave her job in American Apparel to work in a pub in Kentish Town so that she could pursue her dream career in music during the day. 

During this time Muller asked a friend who knew how to use Logic to produce a few demos in exchange for a bottle of wine. After uploading songs to Soundcloud and Instagram in 2017, an unexpected whirlwind happened… she was discovered and signed by her manager at Capitol. 

Speaking about her start, she previously said: “I feel really lucky that in a way I’ve lived a relatively normal life.”

On 5 April 2019, Mae released her debut studio album, titled Chapter 1, and she was also a support act for Little Mix during their 2019 LM5: Tour. She went on to release numerous EP’s, and in 2021, Muller appeared as guest vocalist on When You’re Out, Billen Ted’s follow-up to their number one hit Wellerman. Following this was the moment she collaborated on Better Days, and even got to perform the hit on Jimmy Fallon. 

Better Days went viral on TikTok as part of a challenge, which helped boost its streams to more than a million across all platforms. Better Days peaked at number 32 in the UK but also charted across the world. This echoed the success of Ryder, who found success on TikTok covering pop songs during lockdown before he was selected to compete for the UK.

The BBC hopes to repeat the UK’s success at the 2022 event by once again joining with global management company TaP Music. TaP Music, which has counted Lana Del Rey and Ellie Goulding among its clients, helped select Muller and will also help craft her promotional strategy ahead of the contest. Last year the company revamped the UK’s strategy after years of dismal results.

This included ensuring Ryder’s single, Space Man, got played on BBC Radio 1 instead of Radio 2 and also saw him targeting smaller countries such as San Marino, Serbia, Croatia and Malta, which have the same voting powers as larger countries such as Germany.

Top songs to listen to on Spotify

The best way to get to know a music artist is to listen to them! If you have Spotify, take a listen to these top songs for Mae Muller (or you can search other streaming services):

• Better Days (NEIKED x Mae Muller x Polo G).
• Feels This Good (Sigala, Mae Muller, Caity Baser, Stefflon Don).
• American Psycho.
• I Just Came to Dance. 

And if you would like to check out I Wrote A Song, our Eurovision single – you can listen here. 

For more information about Eurovision entry Mae Muller click here.