Interscope
Ellie Goulding‘s new album Higher Than Heaven is out today and it’s nothing but dance tunes. That’s because when Ellie and her collaborators made it, they sick of the U.K.’s COVID lockdown and only wanted music about escapism and joy.
“It felt like a collective decision,” Ellie tells ABC Audio. “Usually I’ll come in and say, ‘Oh, I want to write something uptempo. I want to write something slow. I’m a feeling a bit weird today, I want to write this.’ But it was just like unanimous…we just wanted to make music to to make people happy.”
Not only that, but all those dance tunes are about being passionately in love. Ellie says in order to get inside those songs, she had to adopt a different persona, like playing a character in a movie.
“I’m playing someone that believes that love for somebody else can save you and you’ll find happiness in someone else,” she explains. “Now, I’m at a certain point in my life where I’m realizing that it was in me all along, and I was constantly searching for it in someone else.”
While Higher than Heaven is designed to make you hit the club, Ellie says during lockdown, she was forced to have a dance party at home.
“I put a couple of songs in my headphones and just danced by myself in the kitchen,” she recalls. “And it’s really empowering. Like, I know dancing is supposed to be with other people, but to dance by yourself like that, it does feel weirdly powerful.”
“I think I really took it for granted, you know, moving and dancing…I think all that stuff, I really missed in lockdown,” she says. “And so I feel like this really is an album to just, like, lose yourself in.”
Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
