Lucy Spraggan on music, therapy and working with Simon Cowell

“I’ve been doing therapy for a long time,” says the 31-year-old. “I speak to my therapist about how I’ve always wanted to do everything on my own, like ‘I don’t need anybody and I’ll do this myself’. And she had me query it and be like, ‘You can actually rely on people when you find the right people, so why don’t you?’ “I left the session and I wrote Balance and I sent it to her. Literally, I left the studio and sent her the song and just said, ‘I wrote this about what you’re teaching me’.”

Her therapist’s response? Spraggan says she thanked her for her openness and praised the track, but added jokingly: “And remember to breathe.” “She’s just really humble,” the singer says. “She’s great.”

Spraggan, who was born and raised in the Peak District, appeared on The X Factor in 2012 but had her highest charting album yet, Choices, last year. That record, which followed a divorce from Georgina Gordon, her wife of three years, and the decision to go sober, reached number five in the charts. “It was like mind blown,” she says with a warm laugh.

Yet the singer has remained busy since then, completing another album, also titled Balance, and writing a memoir, Process, due to be published later this year. The song Balance was written in August 2021 and went into her demo collection until one Simon Cowell heard it.

Yes, the X Factor supremo and fearsome talent scout plays a part in her recent story. Despite having appeared on The X Factor, Spraggan had never spoken to Cowell before. But when she began work on her book, which details her time on the show, she reached out to him. Spraggan is now signed to his publishing company. She calls him a “really thoughtful and really intelligent man” and the pair have already made TV appearances together.

“He has significantly more resources than I do but we have the same opinion – that you could do anything in this world. It is rare to find somebody who truly does believe that. I’m not scared of anything and he’s not really scared of anything. And it’s nice to work with somebody like that.”

Ten years on from her X Factor audition, Spraggan is naturally feeling reflective, and her album and memoir both suggest a newfound sense of calm and forward movement. “The point for me is that I want to tell people that regardless of what happens to you you can be all right, you can be OK,” she says. “There’s various things in there that I chose not to speak about and it took me 10 years to heal enough to do that. I want to tell people that if they’re at year one of that healing process, that eventually you keep going and you will heal.”

– The album Balance by Lucy Spraggan is out on April 28. Her memoir, Process, will be published in July. She’s due to perform in Sheffield in May as part of a tour.