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When Whitney Phillips alchemized her pain into poetry — it paid off big time.
Speaking with PEOPLE at the Netflix Summer Break event at California’s Santa Monica Pier, Phillips recalled a moment in her career when she poured her feelings into a song — and how she reacted when it got picked up by Céline Dion.
“I was at another writing camp in France at the Château de Marouatte,” Phillips, who appears on the Netflix reality series Hitmakers, tells PEOPLE exclusively.
“This big producer Greg Wells was throwing it every year in this magical setting. It was on the heels of a really heartbreaking time for me. A bad breakup,” she continues. “All the writers in that room that day couldn’t have shown up more honestly and vulnerably. And we ended up writing a song called ‘The Hard Way.’ ”
Though she thought it’d be a long shot, Phillips — who wrote the song alongside Wells and Jessica Karpov — asked Wells to pitch it to Dion because she had just lost her husband of 22 years, René Angélil, who died of throat cancer in 2016 at age 73. “If there’s anybody going through a hard time, it might be her,” Phillips thought at the time.
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Sure enough, she heard back a month later and Dion, now 57, was interested in the song. “I was like, ‘My God, I I have passed away.’ Like this is the craziest moment,” she quips. “I’ve been reincarnated ever since.”
In 2019, Phillips celebrated the release of the record, which appeared on the album Courage, on social media and called it “one of my favorite and most personal songs.”
“‘The Hard way’ is a reminder that even through the hardest times, your story ends how you say it does, and that sometimes to get home, you gotta go the hard way,” Phillips wrote on Instagram at the time. “I hope you guys like it and that this song finds anyone out there who may need it.”
Despite the success, when Phillips first started out, she drove out to Los Angeles to pursue her “Britney Spears dream” — but she quickly realized “it wasn’t for me.” She explains, “I was never a performer. What I loved most about music was making it and the stories behind it. So I left my job with the labels, I was interning and I went and waited tables for five years.”
Then, she got a call that Lil Wayne “had put a 16-bar verse on my song,” she recalls. “From that moment on I just began, I got my first publishing deal and I was just in it. And I never, never thought about being an artist again.”
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Now, Phillips — who’s gone on to write songs for Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber and Teddy Swims — is starring on Hitmakers. In the docuseries, 12 top songwriters and producers attend high-stakes songwriting camps to create hits for stars like John Legend, Shaboozey and Lisa of BLACKPINK.
Reflecting on her experience, Phillips says that she was surprised by how “easy it was to block out the cameras and just do the work.” In the end, she hopes viewers understand the business and intricacies of songwriting — because she and her cast mates were “really open and really vulnerable.”
With the show now under her belt and a 13-year songwriting career, Phillips is feeling “very untapped and at the beginning of what I wanna do.”
Hitmakers is now streaming on Netflix.
