Bebe Rexha

Bebe Rexha: The Hitmaker Who Wrote for Everyone Else First

Before Bebe Rexha ever charted as a headline artist, her voice was already inside one of the decade's biggest hits — just not credited on the label. She wrote the chorus for Eminem and Rihanna's "The Monster," a song that reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won a Grammy, while she remained, to most listeners, invisible. It took years and a country-pop detour before her own name became the one on the marquee.

Brooklyn, Musicals, and a Cassette Recorder

Born Bleta Rexha on August 30, 1989, in New York City to Albanian parents and raised on Staten Island, Rexha began performing in musicals at age four and started composing music of her own by eight. She grew up on a steady diet of Britney Spears, Destiny's Child, Aaliyah, and Keyshia Cole, and taught herself trumpet, guitar, and piano along the way. At sixteen, she and two friends formed a girl group, writing and recording songs on cassette recorders outside their school auditorium — a bootstrap operation that nonetheless earned her the "Best Teen Songwriter" recognition at a Grammy Day event run by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, putting her in a room with working producers years before she had any industry leverage of her own.

Black Cards and an Education in the Industry

At nineteen, Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz recruited Rexha for Black Cards, an electronic project that gave her, in her own description, her first real education in how the music business actually functioned — a corrective to a younger assumption that "music was literally just writing the songs and performing them." She provided vocals across several EPs before the project dissolved and she departed in 2012 to build a solo career, uploading demos and acoustic covers to YouTube in the meantime and eventually signing to Warner Bros. in 2013.

Ghostwriting a Number One

Rexha's most consequential early work happened off-camera. She penned "Like a Champion" for Selena Gomez and contributed to tracks for other artists, but her breakthrough credit was co-writing the chorus of "The Monster," Eminem and Rihanna's 2013 single, which topped the Billboard Hot 100 and won a Grammy. The credit transformed her standing inside the industry even as her own name remained largely unknown to the public — a common but frustrating position for a songwriter whose work was reaching hundreds of millions of listeners under someone else's name.

Building a Solo Foundation

Rexha's path to visibility as a performer in her own right ran through featured spots rather than a single breakout single. Her 2016 collaboration with G-Eazy, "Me, Myself & I," reached the Top Ten, and a feature on Martin Garrix's "In the Name of Love" climbed into the Top 30. She released her debut EP, *I Don't Wanna Grow Up*, in May 2015, followed by the two-EP project *All Your Fault* in 2017, which brought in collaborators including Ty Dolla $ign, G-Eazy, Lil Wayne, 2 Chainz, and Gucci Mane.

Meant to Be and a Genre Crossing

The song that finally made Rexha a headline name was an unlikely one for a Brooklyn-born pop songwriter: "Meant to Be," a country-pop duet with Florida Georgia Line, released in 2017. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, earned a Grammy nomination, and spent 28 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot Country Songs chart — an extraordinary run that reshaped how the industry categorized her. The single's success directly inspired her full debut album, *Expectations* (2018), which she co-wrote entirely and which reached No. 13 on the U.S. album chart; its single "I'm a Mess" went gold in both the U.S. and Australia, and the album earned her a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist in 2019 — a category typically reserved for artists without a decade of prior industry credits behind them.

From Pop-R&B to Dance Floor

Rexha's sound kept shifting across subsequent releases. *Better Mistakes* (2021) leaned into expanded collaborations with producers including Greg Kurstin, featuring "Baby, I'm Jealous" with Doja Cat and guest turns from Travis Barker and Pink Sweat$. Her 2023 album *Bebe* pivoted decisively toward dance and disco, anchored by "I'm Good (Blue)" with David Guetta — a track interpolating Eiffel 65's "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" that topped charts in nearly two dozen countries and earned another Grammy nomination — alongside collaborations with Snoop Dogg and Dolly Parton. Her 2026 album *Dirty Blonde* pushed further into electronic dance and house music, including another Guetta collaboration, "Sad Girls," and the festival-oriented trance track "Hysteria."

What the Industry Cost Her

Rexha has been unusually direct about the professional mistreatment she encountered along the way, describing an incident in which a prominent male collaborator dismissed her technical suggestions outright; her response, by her own account, was to walk: "I refuse to be around a man who made me feel small." She credits her own hands-on mastery of ProTools, learned while struggling as a teenager without industry connections, with giving her the technical independence to walk out of sessions where she felt disrespected rather than compromise on the work.

Why Bebe Is Called a Genius

The claim, where it surfaces, rests less on any single dazzling composition than on range and reliability across roles the industry usually keeps separate: a credited co-writer on a Grammy-winning, chart-topping single for other artists before she had a solo deal, a self-taught producer competent enough on ProTools to protect her own work without depending on collaborators, and a solo artist who has moved convincingly through pop, country-pop, hip-hop-adjacent R&B, and dance-EDM across successive albums rather than repeating one formula. That is a case built on versatility, technical self-sufficiency, and commercial instinct rather than singular inventive brilliance — Rexha's own account of her rise emphasizes persistence through a "decade-long journey marked by industry setbacks" more than any claim to natural genius, and much of her biggest commercial success, "Meant to Be," came from a genre crossover she did not originate. The honest reading is that her strongest asset has been adaptability under a difficult, often disrespectful industry, not a singular creative spark.

Legacy

Rexha's career now stands as a documented arc from anonymous hitmaker to headline artist to genre-hopping hitmaker again, a trajectory that traces, album by album, an artist who kept rebuilding her sound rather than settling into the one that first made her famous.

Achievements

• Educated at Berklee College of Music
• Worked as singer, songwriter and composer