Pharrell Williams Confesses His Massive Hit 'Happy' Was Actually Born Out of Sarcasm

Pharrell Williams opens up about the creative process behind his 2013 hit song “Happy.”

In an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music 1 ahead of the release of his biopic Piece by piecethe Neptunes co-founder discussed his approach to one of his biggest hits, “Happy.”

“When I was about 40, it was ‘Get Lucky,’ ‘Blurred Lines,’ ‘Happy,’ all in the same year,” the 51-year-old multihyphenate recalls of his collaborations with Daft Punk and Robin Thicke , that is. “And they were all songs that were more commissioned than they were, I just woke up one day and decided I was going to write about X, Y and Z.”

Pharrell Williams in Toronto in September 2024.

Tracey Biel/Variety via Getty

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During the interview, Williams recalled how he completed the soundtrack for the children’s film Despicable me 2created with Heitor Pereira, and he’s running out of ideas. He asked himself: “How to make a song?” and inspiration.

“That was until you ran out of ideas and asked yourself a rhetorical question and came back with a sarcastic answer. And that’s what ‘Happy’ is,” Williams said. “How do you make a song about a person who is so happy that nothing can bring her down? And I answered her sarcastically and set it to music, and that sarcasm became a song. And that broke me.”

“Happy” became one of the best-selling songs in history with more than 13.9 million copies sold. Per Forbes and CNN, the song was also named the most played song on UK radio in the 2010s and even at one point held the record for the longest music video, lasting 24 hours, until Twenty One Pilots broke the record in 2020 with a video lasting 177 days.

Pharrell Williams, Morgan Neville and Zane Lowe on ‘The Zane Lowe Show’.

The Zane Lowe Show on Apple Music 1

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Elsewhere in the conversation with Lowe, 51, Williams discussed his upcoming film, Piece by piecewith director Morgan Neville, who also directed the documentary Mr. Rogers Won’t you be my neighbor?

The unconventional biopic depicts Williams and his life story in Lego animation.

Neville, 57, explained that the collaborative process for the film was also different: “The thing that was different from, say, a normal documentary is that normally someone shares their story with you and then you figure out how to tell it, which I did, but then I showed it to Pharrell and then he started writing songs based on my vision of his story and then it became such a circular conversation, creatively, about the whole movie.”

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Neville also convinced Williams to include his family in the film.

Speaking to PEOPLE at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, the “Get Lucky” singer said, “I was on the fence. I didn’t know if I really wanted to have my family in it, but I turned around and it was all about him, so I followed his instructions.”

Piece by piece is in theaters on Friday, October 11, and features Gwen Stefani, Kendrick Lamar, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake and other Lego minifigure versions of themselves.

Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education