Ellie Goulding: I’m good at writing pop songs”

Ellie Goulding has started to acknowledge that she is “good” at writing pop songs.

The 36-year-old singer shot to fame more than a decade ago with hits such as ‘Starry Eyed’ but went on to experiment with various sounds over the years and explained upon the release of her fourth album ‘Higher than Heaven’ that the “purpose” of the pop genre is escapism.

She told NME: “My new thing is acknowledging the things I’m good at, and I’m good at writing pop songs. 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. We forget that the purpose of pop is to escape. I realised that a lot of the songs that brought me joy when I was younger were the ones that made me want to move my body. I didn’t know what the lyrics meant, but I’d sing along anyway.”

The ‘By the End of the Night’ hitmaker went on to add that whilst it wasn’t her “intention” to make an album that would make people “forget their worries”, it was what was needed following the “bizarre” times of the COVID-19 lockdowns.

She added: “I didn’t intentionally make an album that people can dance to and forget their worries, it’s just what we needed to do for ourselves coming out of a really bizarre, surreal time. My first album ‘Lights’ was so heavily interpreted and analysed, it made me think that I was supposed to be doing something that perhaps wasn’t in my instincts. I was writing all the songs myself so people assumed they must all be deep and meaningful. A lot of those songs [on ‘Lights’] were about stuff I’d gone through, but it was also a love letter to the electronic music that I grew up listening to.”