Pharrell Credits Frustration-Fueled Moment of Sarcasm While 'Out of Ideas' With Inspiring 2013’s "Happy"

There can be real, measurable power in sarcasm. Just ask Pharrell, who recently credited a bout of sarcasm with ultimately inspiring his 2013 song “Happy.”

During a recent interview with Apple Music legend Zane Lowe alongside Piece by Piece director Morgan Neville, Pharrell spoke with the same sense of calm confidence and contagious candor he’s been putting to use across the entire promo cycle for the Lego-ified biography. Asked by Lowe about a particularly uninspired point in Pharrell’s life that’s depicted in the film, the N.E.R.D. frontman and current Louis Vuitton men’s creative director expanded on a metaphor that’s often associated with the practice of transcendental meditation.

“What happens is you get inspired by something and then you just drain it dry,” Pharrell, who also recently spoke with Jordan Rose for Complex, said. “So then it’s like okay, now what? But that’s the journey. It’s like fishing, you know? Just stay on the boat, keep your ride well-calibrated, keep your bait, keep your hooks—pun intended—and be kind to everyone that’s on your ship.”

Zane then asked Pharrell to get specific about his moment of realization with regards to when he fully accepted that it was time to lock in on a new chapter of his life, thus allowing the kind of growth that led him to his current state of mind. Per Pharrell, it all came to a head when he was around 40 years old.

“That’s when ‘Get Lucky,’ ‘Blurred Lines,’ ‘Happy,’ all of that was, like, the same year,” Pharrell, now 51, said. “So I was like, okay. Whoa. And these were all songs that were more commissions than they were just, like, I woke up one day and decided I’m gonna write about x, y, z. They were commissions.”

Commissions, Pharrell explained, are whatever higher power or overarching existential structure one subscribes to actively engaging with them and asking, in short, whether there was as much intention behind the resulting art as ego would want you to think.

“You didn’t wake up one morning and decide you were gon’ make a song about an emotion,” he said. “This was nine songs that you were trying to really complete this task for this film and you kept hearing no. … And then it was only until you were out of ideas and you asked yourself a rhetorical question and you came back with a sarcastic answer. That’s what ‘Happy’ was.”

Calling “Happy” merely a “hit” would be to dramatically undersell just how inescapable the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack single was for several years straight. Pharrell is the lone credited artist on the 2010s mega-smash, having written and produced the track alone.

Asked to reveal the question that led to the song's creation, Pharrell pointed out that it largely came from an internal sense of “What the hell?” after multiple instances of not being able to nail it when it came to his soundtrack work at the time.

“How do you make a song about a person that’s so happy that nothing can bring them down?” Pharrell said. “So I sarcastically answered it and put music to it and that sarcasm became the song. And that broke me, that broke me. … I had to learn that the universe, we’re in the universe. The universe is a part of everything that we do. 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.”

Pharrell continued, “Nothing is new under the sun. In fact ,the sun that you look up at every day is one of trillions upon trillions upon trillions of other stars. Nothing is new. Once you realize the insignificance of yourself, then you understand what your actual significance is.”

All of this, of course, is remarkably good advice for any artist at any stage of their journey. Pharrell has been routinely dropping gems of this variety in recent months, as seen here and here, respectively.

Piece by Piece is out now. Above, catch Pharrell and Morgan’s full Zaneversation.