The five albums that changed Hailee Steinfeld’s life: “They come back to me like nothing else”

If you haven’t managed to catch Ryan Coogler’s fantastic genre mash-up Sinners yet, then we must entreat you to do so immediately and without delay.

It is a thrilling and constantly surprising cocktail of music, vampires, gore, steaminess and suspense, like Baz Luhrmann directing From Dusk till Dawn, and one of the best things about it is Hailee Steinfeld.

Not only did she write and record a song for the movie, but she also gives a hell of a performance as a jilted wife who is simmering with anger (to say the least), who goes on a personal journey that’s packed full of threat, bravery, sex, and eventually redemption. You would imagine she will be right in the mix, along with many others in the cast, when awards season comes around.

It’s the kind of journey, albeit minus the vampires, that Steinfeld has gone on in real life too, starting out in short films as a child actor before landing a ‘Best Supporting’ Oscar nomination for the 2010 True Grit reboot at just 13. But she struggled to find a hit project in the following years, appearing in the likes of strange sci-fi Ender’s Game and suffering a couple of abandoned movie roles.

She did have a major hit alongside Anna Kendrick with Pitch Perfect 2 in 2015 though, and it was thanks to her playing some songs to a record label at a promo event for the film that she was signed up and released a debut single that proved to be one of the most successful for a first-time female artist in history.

Since then, she’s mixed music, TV and movies incredibly effectively, taking on the likes of big-budget superhero fare in addition to period drama and voicing animation. She’s taken long breaks from recording in order to focus more on acting, but her musical influences show the kind of willingness to embrace different styles and ideas.

In picking her favourite albums for Elle, Steinfeld chose records that span Suffolk acoustic pop, ‘70s soft rock, and Canadian rap. Leading off with Hotel California by The Eagles, Steinfeld said: “I saw the Eagles perform years ago and I remember not really paying much attention to what was going on with the audience, but I knew every word to every song… This album is represented in so many family memories that, to this day, they come back to me like nothing else.”

Next up was the posthumous double album This Is It by Michael Jackson, explaining: “I bought an ‘I love Michael Jackson’ shirt and I wore it all the time. Everybody would ask me what my favorite Michael Jackson song was and I would list every song off This Is It.”

Another hit-packed album on Steinfeld’s list is + by our own Ed Sheeran, and she raves: “There are some songs that you listen to that you wish you could have written, and I feel like that’s every song on this album for me.”

Harmony collective Boyz II Men also made the cut, with Steinfeld saying of their 1997 album Evolution: “This is the album where I realized that singing is an art—what they do with their voices is so intricate and so incredible.”

Finally, Steinfeld went with Canadian hip-hop star Drake and his album Views, saying: “He’s done things that are different and I completely respect that. It’s Drake, he can do anything, but there’s so much in this album that I’ve found myself referencing when I go into the studio wanting to make new music.”