Look on the Brightest side
It’s been a long time between albums for Ellie Goulding, and she has plenty to say
ELLIE Goulding hasn’t been idle in the five years since her last album.
The Brit Award winner and owner of three UK No1s – Burn, Love Me Like You Do and her cover of Joni Mitchell’s River –crossed the globe on her Delirium World Tour and got married last year to art dealer Caspar Jopling.
Lockdown has also seen Ellie, 33, keeping busy as she prepares to release her fourth studio album, Brightest Blue, next Friday. Here, she tells us more:
Delirium was out in 2015, so this has been your longest gap between albums. What have you been up to?
I definitely went around the world a few times over. And even going to Australia and New Zealand was big, you have to take quite a lot of time to deal with that undertaking because the jetlag is crazy. I remember a few trips where it took me weeks to get over it.
So yeah, for those years I was travelling a lot and then when I got back I was just in no place to write music particularly. I’d just spent the last three years on tour with my music and I think it can get a bit much. I think I wanted to have some kind of normality, I wanted to see my friends, I wanted to spend the last years of my earlier 30s as well, trying to have a life that was beyond touring and singing.”
In lockdown (which delayed your album release from June) you took part in Global Citizen’s charity concert as well as the BBC’s Big Night In, with its charity cover of the Foo Fighters’ Times Like These. Was it important to do something for others?
One side of me wanted to hide and use the time for myself, to grow myself in order to be able to give everyone a better version of myself at the end.
But I understood I was still a person of comfort to some people and maybe someone a few people looked up to, so I felt like it was better to use my voice than not.
I’d like to think the things I like to talk about and shine a light on are causes for the greater good so I made that decision that I was going to be present during this time.
To be honest, it was also a comfort to me to know we can all still be there for each other virtually and give each other that support, so I’m glad I did.
And as it comes to an end, I’ve become so used to this virtual comfort in people that it’s going to be odd to go back to normal life, but I think we’re all faced with that.
Tell us about Brightest Blue
It’s a hopeful album. I acknowledge things on the album that suggest things aren’t going quite right in the world. But I try to offer resolutions and a sense that you can escape it, and create your own world about yourself. I like the idea that my music helps people or makes people feel more positive or makes them feel like they can escape, and hopefully that’s what this album will do.
I hope so – well, that’s the general idea anyway.
I read that you were living in America and went to see an art installation by Doug Wheeler which inspired the album?
I moved to New York for a couple of years and the one thing I noticed was that there was always a new exhibition or a new opening, a new showcase of a new artist, so I was just immersed in art for a few years.
I went to an exhibition by Doug Wheeler and it was essentially walking into a blue, luminous room, where you can’t escape the blue.
I immediately felt this feeling of warmth and
happiness, and then I went to the studio and wrote the title song Brightest Blue.
“Blue” has connotations of feeling down, but putting “Brightest” adds hope. Is that the thought of the title?
Halcyon Days (the title of the reissued 2012 album) are the days of happiness that come after a lot of turmoil.
So I always have this theme of bittersweet or melancholic where you overcome these days of sadness.
Brightest Blue is being able to find the light in sadness.
Blue was always associated with being down but I thought Brightest Blue was a good way to accept you’ll always have those kind of feelings, but learning how to illuminate them.
● Brightest Blue is out next Friday, July 17.