Pharrell Williams is opening up his personal feelings in regards to the inventive course of behind his hit 2013 observe “Happy.”
In an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music 1 forward of the discharge of his biographical movie Piece by Piece, the Neptunes co-founder mentioned his strategy to one in all his greatest hits, “Happy.”
“When I was about 40, that's when ‘Get Lucky,' ‘Blurred Lines,' ‘Happy', all of that was the same year,” the 51-year-old multihyphenate remembers concerning his collaborations with Daft Punk and Robin Thicke, respectively. “And these were all songs that were more commissions than they were just like, I woke up one day and decided I'm going to write about X, Y and Z.”
Tracey Biel/Variety by way of Getty
During the interview, Williams recalled finishing the soundtrack for the kids's movie Despicable Me 2, created with Heitor Pereira, and working out of concepts. He requested himself, “How do you make a song?” and inspiration struck.
“It was only until you were out of ideas and you asked yourself a rhetorical question and you came back with a sarcastic answer. And that's what ‘Happy' was,” Williams mentioned. “How do you make a song about a person that's so happy that nothing can bring them down? And I sarcastically answered it and put music to it, and that sarcasm became the song. And that broke me.”
“Happy” has turn out to be one of many best-selling songs in historical past with over 13.9 million copies bought. Per Forbes and CNN, the observe additionally went on to be declared the most-played tune on British radio within the 2010s and even held the document for longest music video at one level, sitting at 24 hours long till Twenty One Pilots smashed the document in 2020 with a 177-day-long video.
The Zane Lowe Show on Apple Music 1
Elsewhere within the dialog with Lowe, 51, Williams mentioned his forthcoming movie, Piece by Piece, with director Morgan Neville, who additionally helmed the Mr. Rogers documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?.
The unconventional biographical movie depicts Williams and his life story in Lego animation.
Neville, 57, defined that the collaborative course of for the movie was additionally totally different: “The thing that was different than say a normal documentary is normally somebody shares their story with you and then you figure out how to tell it, which I did, but then I showed it back to Pharrell and then he started writing songs based on my view of his story. And then it became this kind of circular conversation, creatively then about the entire film.”
Neville additionally satisfied Williams to incorporate his household within the movie.
In a dialog with PEOPLE on the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, the “Get Lucky” singer mentioned, “I was on the fence. I didn't know if I really wanted to have my family in it, but, again, I turned everything over to him, so I followed his direction.”
Piece by Piece is in theaters Friday, Oct. 11 and options Gwen Stefani, Kendrick Lamar, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake and extra voicing Lego minifigure variations of themselves.
