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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.
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.”
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.
“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.
