Ellie Goulding took over Billboard‘s Instagram on Friday (July 17) to dish about her new double album Brightest Blue in this week’s edition of First Stream+.
Filming from her home in London, the pop star opened up about the inspiration behind her long-awaited fourth LP, which arrives nearly four years after 2015’s Delirium. “It was written a few years back in New York,” she says of Brightest Blue in the IGTV exclusive. “But I’ve kind of gone back to the songs, I’ve changed them a bit, I’ve made them a bit more relevant to who I am now. I’ve just kind of thrown all my honesty and all my vulnerability and my past relationships, all of that stuff I’ve kind of thrown it onto this album and, you know, I’ll deal with the consequences another time.
“And then the second half is much more my character that I play, which is where I pretend to be this very empowered, powerful, unapologetic, amazing woman, where I’m just invincible and not afraid of anything. Which is not the real me, but a character that I like to play,” she continues, pointing out her persona in tracks like Juice WRLD collab “Hate Me,” the Blackbear-assisted “Worry About Me” and “Close to Me” featuring Diplo and Swae Lee.
“They all end with ‘Me,’ that was not intentional,” Goulding quips while seated at the piano. “Me, me, me. That’s why the album’s called EG.0, that side. The other, Side A, is complete opposite of that. It’s me just putting my heart on my sleeve and putting everything out there for y’all to enjoy.”
Elsewhere in the video, the British pop singer takes a break from making quarantine smoothies to tease what fans can expect from her next tour. “I think it’s gonna be a lot more minimal and I’m gonna take fewer people with me,” she says in the clip. “It’s gonna be more about moi…I’ll have like a one-man-band situation.”
Brightest Blue is out now via Polydor. Check out Goulding’s exclusive IGTV video for Billboard below.
