Ellie Goulding on ‘Higher Than Heaven’: “We forget that the purpose of pop is to escape”

nme.com:

Ellie Goulding has spoken to NME about new album ‘Higher Than Heaven’, her Calvin Harris-collab ‘Miracle’ riding high in the charts and the possibility of representing the United Kingdom in Eurovision.Goulding’s fifth album ‘Higher Than Heaven’ was released on Friday (April 7) – and was written intentionally as purely escapist pop.“My new thing is acknowledging the things I’m good at, and I’m good at writing pop songs,” Goulding told NME. “I’ve made a classical album, I’ve made electronic music and I regularly give my vocal away to producers like Four Tet.

There are so many genres of music that I’ve been lucky to explore but when it comes down to it, I really just love making big pop songs that you hear on the radio.”Work began on ‘Higher Than Heaven’ in the early days of lockdown restrictions being lifted. “It was such a unique time and everybody was still trying to process what the fuck just happened, so we cracked open some drinks and made some music,” said Goulding, who worked with the likes of Greg Kurstin, Andrew Wells and Stephen ‘Koz’ Kozmeniuk for the record.“We just had so much fun but [because of the constantly changing restrictions] there was still this feeling of being stuck.

We didn’t want to write serious songs, we wanted to write about silly things and dancing.”Goulding went on to say that early on in her career, she’d always take the same 10 songs into a session and say “I want to sound a bit like this, and this”, but instead “ended up sounding like none of it because my voice is too weird to possibly emulate anyone else.”For ‘Higher Than Heaven’ though, “there’s a lot of ‘80s influences, there’s some The Weeknd, some Dolly Parton and some ABBA.