Pharrell‘s entire outlook on life changed when he made his smash single “Happy” from a sarcastic place out of frustration from multiple failed attempts at trying to make an actually happy song.
On Thursday (October 11), Skateboard P stopped by Apple Music to chop it up with Zane Lowe about his new Lego biopic, Piece By Piece.
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As Zane noted Pharrell’s personal evolution, he asked what sparked the change – which P credited to the accidental hit of “Happy.”
“When I was about 40, that’s when ‘Get Lucky,’ ‘Blurred Lines,’ ‘Happy,’ all that was the same year,” he began. “So I was like okay, whoa. And these were all songs that were more commissions instead of, I just woke up one day and decided I’m gonna write about xyz.”
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He explained that he tried nine different times to make a song about happiness for Despicable Me 2, only to have each one turned down. Success only came once he was “out of ideas” and tried something different.
“[I] asked myself a rhetorical question and came back with a sarcastic answer, and that’s what ‘Happy’ was,” he explained.
“[The question was,] ‘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 that all of what I thought it was supposed to be didn’t do that, and I had to learn that the universe is a part of everything we do. It’s so crazy.”
The convo begins around the 16:18 mark below.
Pharrell listens to his own music a bit differently than the average person — especially his 2003 smash hit with Snoop Dogg, “Beautiful.”
Speaking to Kelefa Sanneh on CBS Sunday Morning during another stop on his Piece By Piece promo run, the super-producer was elaborating on the “mixed feelings” that came with his early-aughts ubiquity as part of The Neptunes — particularly about his falsetto singing on the aforementioned Snoop track.
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“I had a song called ‘Beautiful’ with Snoop, right?” Pharrell said to Sanneh. “Girls heard me singing that. I heard Mickey Mouse.”
“I swear to you, when you just get a moment and you just listen, you’ll never be able to unhear it again,” he continued. “But that’s what I hear.”
