Pharrell Williams On Why ‘Happy’s’ Global Success Isn’t Exactly A Cheerful Thing For Him

“Because I’m happy clap along if you feel like a room without a roof / Because I’m happy clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth,” is the popular lyrics to a song that lives rent-free in the minds of countless fans some days – bright ones, especially – but it doesn’t necessarily evoke happy memories in the mind of its writer.

When Pharrell Williams penned ‘Happy,’ he was feeling the opposite and meant the song to be sarcastic.

How Pharrell Williams Came To Write the Grammy-winning Song ‘Happy’

One of Pharrell Williams’ biggest hits is ‘Happy’ – the song he didn’t necessarily anticipate to catapult him to massive fame in the 2010s.

Williams wrote ‘Happy’ as a soundtrack to 2013’s ‘Despicable Me 2,’ which went on to attract a massive, rounding out the year as the third highest grossing movie. Four months after the movie premiered, Williams released it as a single alongside a 24-hour-long music video.

However, the song was not an instant hit and needed sometime to worm its way into people’s ears and hearts. That same year, it was nominated for an Oscar and won the Grammy for the best music video, thereby creating more buzz around the song.

By the time 2014 rolled in, fans have so far gotten to love the song so much that it spent 10 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 in 2014.

The song was named Billboard’s best-selling song of 2014, and further ranked 21st on its 2010 decade-end chart.

Britney Spears Takes No Prisoners In Latest Voice Memo Describing Her Conservatorship

View Story

Pharrell Williams Says Fans’ Reception To ‘Happy’ Changed His Worldview

Despite all the numerous achievements that ‘Happy’ has managed to make, the project wasn’t exactly thrilling for Williams. Why? According to him, “Happy,” “Blurred Lines,” and “Get Lucky” were all songs that he’d been commissioned to write.

He told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that the success of those songs made him realize that he wasn’t the architect of his own success.

“You didn’t wake up one morning and decide you were going to make a song about an emotion,” Williams said, referring to “Happy.”

For the scene where Gru was feeling on top of the world after coming back from a first date, Williams revealed he wrote nine songs for it, but that they were all rejected.

“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.”

When the song was widely received by the audience, Williams confessed it made him feel insignificant.

“It’s so crazy for us to think like as individuals, everything comes from us. Your ideas, everything that you get, is coming from a library of existence. Nothing is new under the sun,” he said.

Be sure to catch up on everything happening in the world of Pharrell Williams right now. Come back here often for all Pharrell Williams spoilers, news, and updates.

Editorial credit: lev radin / Shutterstock.com