Kings Elliot, courtesy.

Singer-songwriter Kings Elliot dyed her hair blue and took on the royal moniker to give herself the courage to be honest in her music. The 22-year-old half-Swiss, half-English artist, who’s about to undertake a run of shows with Stephen Sanchez, writes frankly about her mental health struggles, even as she’s kept her given name to herself.

“I just put it all out there and I’m really glad I did,” she said in a recent video call, where she chatted about her busy year, her personal lyricism and her rescue bunnies.

She’s coming off a huge 2022, when she opened for Imagine Dragons in North America and Sam Ryder in Europe, released EP Bored of the Circus and had a song (“Lost Again”) featured in video game “The Callisto Protocol.” The Imagine Dragons tour—her first—thrusted her onto stadium stages right off the bat.

“It was also probably the biggest one I’ll ever do,” she said.

Kings Elliot is open in her music about her struggles with borderline personality disorder, depression and anxiety. Performing the songs is a challenge, she acknowledged. So she starts slowly, makes some eye contact with the audience and tries to feel out its receptiveness before opening up further. At one show in Berlin, she broke down crying during her song “Ashes By the Morning,” which she’d only performed a few times before that. By the end of the song she was sobbing uncontrollably. It became a cathartic moment when she noticed a few people crying along with her.

“It can be very daunting, because you don’t know what they’ll think of you in these bigger venues,” she said.

The artist said she never consciously set out to write such personal matters, but came out of her because they’re the ideas and thoughts she has bouncing around in her head. They’re a way of coping with or working through them.

“All my songs are about things that I’ve gone through, or things that I feel. I write these songs because I need to to deal with the stuff that goes on in my head and in my heart,” she said.

When recording her Bored of the Circus, she didn’t have any other singers with her in the studio. So when she needed a choir on “Ashes By the Morning,” she recorded herself singing in different voices and pretending to be different people like a little girl and an old man, among other characters.

Kings Elliot was born in Switzerland to a Swiss father and an English mother. It’d been her dream to move to London to pursue music since she was 16, when she started setting money aside. She accomplished her goal after graduating from high school.

Once in London, she took a pop songwriting course, with writing and arts development, at a music school.

“I thought, ‘I have to do that because I won’t know anyone,’ and then I was just working a million jobs,” she said. “I had like five jobs at the same time.”

These included night receptionist at a music studio, ticket collector at venues and working at a record label.

“I thought [the music school] would be the big thing, but working all these different jobs in music is how I met most of the people that I now work with,” she said.

Six years of hustling in London finally paid off, but Kings Elliot had to take the initial step of pooling all the money that she’d earned and self-releasing her debut EP, Chaos in My Court, in 2021. That got the attention of artist managers and eventually a record deal with Verve Forecast. It might seem like another overnight success story from the outside, but success didn’t come overnight for her.

“If I had given up two years ago, when I had a breakdown – and I wanted to give up then – that wouldn’t have happened,” she said. “A lot of people give up along the way, and I didn’t. I just keep going all the time, because I feel like I don’t have a choice, because this is my thing; this is the only thing for me.”

These, in addition to writing songs, Kings Elliot turns to her fans online, whom she calls the “Sick Puppy Comfort Club,” to relax and blow off steam. She said she likes to go live on Twitch and play a video game while fans chat with her and with each other.

“I called myself a sick puppy as a joke once, because to me it’s kind of a cute description of someone who struggles with mental health,” she said. “When I started putting music out, people were saying, ‘Well, I’m a sick puppy, too.’ And I thought, there needs to be a sick puppy comfort club where people can just hang out and be themselves and feel at ease.”

Her other way of staying grounded—when she’s not on tour—is by spending time with her four emotional support bunnies, all of whom she adopted and have special needs. One has a disabled leg and another has dental issues that require regular vet visits, for example. When she is playing shows, her boyfriend and another friend she met while working at a pet shop babysit them.

“They all have problems, which is why I adopted them,” she said. “I didn’t expect that I was going to be going on tour and having a career. I [didn’t] know if it’s ever gonna happen for me, but I know that this bunny needs me!”

Follow Rachel Alm at Twitter.com/thouzenfold and Instagram.com/thousandfold.