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One of the biggest hits of the 2010s was 2013’s “Happy” by Pharrell Williams. The song, which was written for the soundtrack of Despicable Me 2, has sold 13.9 million copies to date, making it one of the top-selling songs in history. It also has the distinct honor of being one of the UK’s most-played songs in the 2010s. Pharrell is currently doing press for his new movie, Piece by Piece, which came out on Friday, October 11. Piece by Piece is a biography told via Lego animation. It features Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Timbaland, and Kendrick Lamar as Lego minifigure versions of themselves.
While doing press for the movie, Pharrell shared that “Happy” was actually written as sarcasm! There wasn’t any grand inspiration behind it. Instead, Pharrell was commissioned to write a song for the soundtrack, and was running out of ideas when he decided to sarcastically write a song about a happy person who can’t be brought down. At the end of the day, it “broke” him.
Pharrell Williams is opening up his own emotions about the creative process behind his hit 2013 track “Happy.” In an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music 1 ahead of the release of his biographical film Piece by Piece, the Neptunes co-founder discussed his approach to one of his biggest 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 recalls regarding 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.”
During the interview, Williams recalled completing the soundtrack for the children’s film Despicable Me 2, created with Heitor Pereira, and running out of ideas. He asked 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 said. “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 become one of the best-selling songs in history with over 13.9 million copies sold. Per Forbes and CNN, the track also went on to be declared the most-played song on British radio in the 2010s and even held the record for longest music video at one point, sitting at 24 hours long until Twenty One Pilots smashed the record in 2020 with a 177-day-long video.
Putting the whole it breaking him thing aside, that’s actually a pretty good origin story for one of that decade’s biggest songs. I’m sure all of the the money that he made off of it didn’t hurt, either. But, that’s the creative process for you. Sometimes the best things, creatively, come out of us kicking and screaming. Some ideas just flow right out, as though they were always meant to exist. Yet, other times, it’s like pulling teeth to even get started, and then, suddenly, you realize that the final product is actually really freaking good. Also, has anyone seen Piece by Piece? I had no idea what it was about until I read Pharrell’s interview.
Photos credit: Thomas Floyd/Avalon, Jennifer Graylock-Graylock.com/Avalon, Tatiana/Backgrid
