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Pharrell Williams is excited about his upcoming solo album G I R L, which will be in stores on Monday, but he’d rather not think about his previous solo album, In My Mind, which came out in 2006. Looking back, the Oscar-nominated star says that the album, which was not a big hit, was all about his own ego; he claims it had “no purpose.”
“I wrote those songs out of ego, talking about the money I was making and the by-products of living that lifestyle,” he tells GQ. “What was good about that? What’d you get out of it? There was no purpose. I was so under the wrong impression at that time.I didn’t realize you should have a purpose. I thought you just did it just to do it.”
At the time he made the record, Pharrell was the hottest producer in the game, and says he was taken in by the trappings of success.
“The money was too loud…the girls were too beautiful. The jewelry was too shiny. The cars were too fast. The houses were too big. It’s like not knowing how to swim and being thrown in the ocean for the first time. Everything is just too crazy,” he says about those times. “I wanted to be like Jay[-Z]. I wanted to be like Puff [Daddy]. Those are their paths. I got my own path. But I didn’t know what my path was.”
These days, Pharrell knows how to, as he puts it, “put purpose” into his music. With G I R L, a record filled with songs mostly about love and sex, he says he’s paying tribute to women and girls because they’ve “just been so loyal to me and supported me.” In addition, according to the singer, they rule the universe.
“There is no breathing human being on this planet that did not benefit by a woman saying yes twice,” Pharrell explains to GQ. “Yes to make you, and yes to have you. Point-blank. If women wanted to cripple the economy, all they gotta do is not go to work….if they wanted to end our species…like, women can look out into space at all the stars and go, ‘You know what? I can actually end all the human life on this planet right now. All I gotta do is just say no.’”
You can read the entire interview over at GQ.com.
Copyright 2014 ABC News Radio
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