Dua Lipa Tells Trixie Mattel About the Time She Got Rejected From Her School Choir

Dua Lipa and Trixie Mattel are both excellent music artists — but visual art isn’t quite their thing.

The duo teamed up for a collaboration on the RuPaul’s Drag Race alum’s YouTube channel on Monday (March 18), where they challenged each other to paint the album art for Lipa’s upcoming album, Radical Optimism. “I can’t draw. I can do my eyeliner because I mastered it on my own face,” the pop star admitted. “I don’t really like doing things I’m not good at, and this is something I’m not good at.”

However, Mattel and Lipa were soon painting, doing their best at recreating the beachy album cover that features the 28-year-old singer floating in an ocean facing a shark fin. At one point in their wide-ranging conversation, Mattel asked Lipa if it’s true that she had once gotten rejected from her school choir. “I was in primary school and the teacher was like, ‘Alright, who wants to sing and try out for the choir?’ So I decided to stand up for the whole school and he started playing on the piano, and it was in this crazy high note and nothing came out just air and the whole schools started laughing. And he was like, you know what? Better luck next time. That was it. Later on, I was part of the choir but I was in the lower range,” Lipa recalled.

She then added that she “went to singing lessons in a theater school every Saturday in London and it was the teacher there that helped me build up my confidence.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Lipa explained the inspiration behind her Radical Optimism album title. “It was actually a term that was introduced to me through a friend of mine,” she said. I was doing an interview with him and he was like, I heard this term radical optimism, and I think that’s something you really need. It stuck with me. He put that term in my psyche and everything in my life started connecting to that about remaining calm in the chaos and being OK when things don’t go the way you intended them to.”

When the time came to reveal their paintings to each other, both Mattel and Lipa were unsatisfied with their work. “Check out Radical Optimism, people, you’re gonna need it,” Mattel joked.

The 11-track project — Lipa’s first proper LP since 2020’s Future Nostalgia — arrives May 3. Watch the full interview below.