Perrie takes us through her debut solo album: First dates, friendships and finding her own path

A tale as old as time, it’s never easy for a band member to immediately assume an artistic identity outside of their preconceived public persona. By Perrie’s own admission, it’s a process that’s seen her overcome some stubborn imposter syndrome, shamelessly going back to the drawing board in pursuit of the perfect opening statement.

Now completely ‘content’ and ready to unleash a record she’s ‘so happy’ with, we catch up with Perrie to hear the stories behind each song on the self-titled solo debut, track by track.

Forget About Us

“I just remember the excitement of heading into the unknown and not knowing what the hell was gonna happen. I was thinking how lucky I felt to have like Ed Sheeran want to work with me. I love Ed, I think he’s such an amazing songwriter, such an incredible artist.

“Forget About Us just felt big. It’s a big pop record, with the live band. I love performing it live as well, I feel like it sounds even better.”

If He Wanted To He Would

“I love it so much. I felt I knew this song was going to be amazing the second I wrote it. Sometimes you can be in the studio writing something, and you think, ‘this is the best thing ever.’ Then you hear it again and you think ‘oh, it’s not cute!’ But with this one, I just felt a serotonin hit every time. It just got bigger and bigger, and I love pop records that just soar with the melody and the chorus. It’s a classic, sculpted pop song.

“Concept-wise, I’m at the point where I’m 32 and I’m still having my friends come to me for advice. They still make up these lame f*cking excuses about the guy or whoever they’re messaging. And I’m like, ‘stop settling for the bare minimum. We’re not applauding people for doing f*ck all!’

“In the past, when I’ve been in relationships that weren’t necessarily right for me, my mum would say, ‘Do you know what, darling? If you love him, we all love him. If you hate him, we go to war.’ That’s why, in the middle eight, I’m like, ‘if you love him. I love that for you, but I’d f*ck him up if you wanted me to!'”

Sand Dancer

“This is probably one of the last songs that I did. I was listening to a lot of Sam fender at the time. I just love him. I was in a session with Nina Nesbit, The Nocturns boys, and Ed Drewett. Ed has written so many f*cking great songs for Little Mix, One Direction, everybody! He just gets it.

“We were chatting, and he was like, ‘why don’t we just do a song about you being a Geordie lass?’ I was like, ‘well, you know, I’m not technically Geordie. I was born in South Shields. I was born and raised on the beach, so I’m a sand dancer!’ Ed was like, ‘well, that’s f*cking cool.’ 

“The song is basically about growing up in South Shields. When I grew up there was this little pub on the beach front called the Crab Shack, which is now called the Sand Dancer, and people used to get up and busk. Everyone was so confident, they’d get up and Something in me always wanted to do it, but I was just too scared.

“Then one night, I went with my friends, and everyone was up busking, and I messaged my brother, Jonnie. I hit him up, and I was like, ‘Jonnie, where you at tonight? Because I’d love to get up and sing, but I’d rather you came.’ My brother, bless him, got his guitar in the car, drove down to the beach, did a rehearsal, and we got up and sang Halo by Beyoncé and some Paolo Nutini. Nobody else would do that but my brother. That’s why the song’s like, ‘Jonnie, where you at? Whiskey and cola, I tried to the edge off, but as soon as we started singing, we just couldn’t stop.’

“I thought, f*ck, I love this!'”

Rocket Scientist

“This is a Jon Bellion song, which is crazy to me. I adore him. I’m such a fan. Everything he’s done for Justin Bieber, I’m floored by. This song I’ve had this song for a very long time. 

“Actually, this was what I originally thought was going to be my first single. I think because it has the pop side to it, but it also sounds a little bit country with its melody. I loved how big the vocal was and how it showed off my range. I just loved everything about it, and I thought it was so beautiful. Then obviously Forget About Us kind of took its crown. But honestly, for so long, I thought, ‘this is my first single. This is what I want to come out with first. I just love this song so much, and now it gets its moment as the focus track on Friday.”

Baby Steps

“This song I wrote at a writing camp in Weymouth, because that’s where I grew up for a few years in my life. We thought it’d be nice to go there, visit my mum, visit my family. We hired out this house, did a big writing camp, and Baby Steps was one of the songs that I wrote with GRACEY and Sophia. 

“We were talking about how we’ve all been through heartbreak, and how hideous it is. How it just like hurts so much, and you want to get through it as quickly as you can. But really, you have to just take it day-by-day. Yeah. It always takes baby steps to get through it.
One of the lyrics that stands out to me when we wrote this song, was, I said to the girls, ‘Do you know what really hurt me the most, going through my breakup? This sounds really horrible and morbid to say, but when people die, they’re gone. You grieve them, you go through the stages of grief, and you have to come to terms with the fact they’re gone. 

“What killed me more than anything is the person I loved and adored so much did was still walking the earth, they just didn’t want me. The lyric ‘hurts to know you chose to do life without me’ is about trying to get through that heartbreak. You rush to your bed because you can’t bear thinking that they’re still out there, and all this crap that comes with it. But the main point is it takes baby steps. You take it day-by-day, and you get through it eventually.

“It’s so funny because I found a video on my phone the other day, of us in the studio, and GRACEY is playing a pot of hummus, like smacking this pot of hummus like a drum. That’s how it all came about – Baby Steps came from a pot of hummus!”

Bonnie and Clyde

“Bonnie and Clyde is a dramatic, over the top way of trying to explain how much I love Alex. I have those moments where I’m just staring at him across the room, and I think ‘I love you so much. I hope it’s mutual!’ I know he loves me, obviously, but I think ‘do you love me an unhinged amount? Because I do!’

It’s a dramatised way of saying I would do anything for him. I wanted this to sound quite Radiohead, a bit Creep, a bit eerie. Then when the guitars kick in towards the end, I wanted them to sound really heavy, really rocky.”

Pushing Up Daisies

“This is an Ed Sheeran song so, again, it’s got that amazing, banging pop chorus. I love the concept of just wanting to live your best life until you’re dead. It’s so uplifting, and I love the bridge, it’s just soaring. Good old Ed Sheeran swooped in with another banger!”

Cute Aggression

“Cute Aggression is my favourite thing, because I get it all the time. I get it with babies, I get it with Alex, I get it with Axel. It’s funny, scientifically, we’re we’re built to handle emotions, so when we’re sad, we cry, when we when we’re happy, we laugh. But when you see something cute, your brain doesn’t know how to quite compute – you just want to squeeze it! The science behind it is that it’s so cute you want to, like, make it look deformed again. 

“I did this one with Ed Drewett as well. He was like, ‘your cute aggression is sick, what even is that?’ So I explained it to him, and then we kind of just ran with it. It was such a fun session. I remember just laughing and having the best time. What’s crazy is I only did two sessions with Ed Drewett on this whole project, and they’ve both made it.”

Miss You

“Miss You was the first song I ever had. It was a demo sent by MNEK and Tre Jean-Marie. I love them both, and I worked with them so much in Little Mix. I remember being in studio with them one day, and they were like, ‘when you go solo, what do you think you’re gonna do?’ I was like, ‘sonically, I don’t know what the vibe would be, because I’m so eclectic with music.’ But I said ‘Look, one thing I know for sure is I want to sing, sing.’

“Then, when I went solo a year or two after Little Mix went on their break, I got this song, and a note from MNEK saying, ‘Well, you wanted to sing, sing!’ 

“I remember just being floored by it, thinking, ‘this is the best thing ever – such a timeless, classic ballad.’ It’s one of the hardest songs I’ve ever had to sing, but I love it so much.

“Alex loves, loves, loves Miss You. That’s the one he played to all his friends when I recorded it, bless him, even though he usually loves the more upbeat songs.”

Punchline

“I was in the session, and I just said ‘the way I feel right now, I feel like life’s thrown so much sh*t at me, and so many obstacles, and I feel like the universe is testing me constantly. I just want to have, like, a smooth sailing f*cking time. Yeah, I don’t understand why things keep happening to me. 

“I kept saying, like, I feel like I’m a good person, I feel like I’m nice, I feel like I’m generous, I look after my friends and family. I’m never mean to people. I very rarely dislike anyone. Maybe I was just a f*cker in another life?

“I honestly thought ‘If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry. Sometimes I have to just take the piss out of things, because it’s getting a bit much. That’s why the lyrics’s ‘when life hands me lemons, I just plant another tree, but now I’ve got an orchard. I drink lemonade for free.’

“My dad came over the other week, and he f*cking loves this album so much. We were listening to it, and he went, ‘it’s ironic, this song, isn’t it? You say ‘I’ve always got the punchline,’ but you never get the joke, do you?’ It’s true, the joke always goes over my head!”

Put You First

“Put You First is another song I wrote at the Weymouth writing camp, this time with Phil Plested. He’s an incredible songwriter, who’s worked with Lewis Capaldi and Niall Horan a lot. He he’s just so freaking good. I was talking about how much I adore being a mum, how much Axel means to me, how he’s such a small human in my arms, but, when I’m holding him, I feel lifted up.

“Then Axel came into the room and he started singing on the mic, and that’s why he features on it. I was looking at the videos the other day, and I was trying to work out how old he was. I think it was either just before he turned two or as he turned two. Oh, my God, he sounds like such a baby. Yeah, I love that song. He loves that song too because he’s like, ‘that’s me!'”

Absofuckinglutely

“Absofuckinglutely was a joy to write. It was one of those where we were taking the piss so much, we were like, ‘guys, is this actually working? Are we going delulu?’

“I was like, ‘No, we’re running with it, because I love a good wedding proposal song, right? Like Bruno Mars’s Marry You.

“But me and Alex aren’t hopeless romantics. We’re not ‘oh my gosh, and I said yes, it was the best day of my life!’ We more take the piss out of each other. Our love language is humour and banter, and that’s why the lyric’s ‘Mr. Perfect Time, had me waiting years, it feels like I’m in a movie. He said, ‘Marry me,’ I said ‘Absofuckinglutely!”

“I love when the production kicks in on this one, as well. It feels like a smiley face emoji.”

Where You Are

“Where You Are I wrote while Alex was in Turkey, because obviously we do the long distance thing quite a lot. Now he’s home and, oh my God, I love it. Just having him home has made me so happy. But this song I wrote when I was just missing him so much, and I missed everything about him.

“This is our story about how we got together, and after the first time I saw him he was like, ‘do you want to come meet my friends?’

“We were driving into London to meet his friends at this bar place and Shout Out To My Ex had just come out. It was its height, in its moment, that song f*cking took over the world for a hot minute.

“We were pulling up to the cash points, and Shout Out was on the radio. Alex got out of the car, opened all the doors, blasted the radio up and started dancing in the street, and it felt like something from a movie. I was like, ‘Oh my God.’

“I just looked at my best friend and was like ‘Ellie, I love him. No, like, I’m obsessed with him. He is unreal.’ He was just so charismatic. The fact he didn’t care, and he’d got out in the middle of London and just blasted that. It was just so fun.

“But, honestly, he’s just the best. Where You Are is about us, our storyline, and how I feel like we’ve had the invisible string theory all the way through. These weird coincidence that’ve happened throughout our lives that we didn’t even know until we met.”

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Same Place Different View

“Same Place Different View is about a friendship that I no longer have. In music, a lot of the time we hear heartbreak songs about this romantic significant other, but we don’t often talk about losing a friend and how it hurts as much as heartbreak, if not worse.

“In life, relationships, they come and go. You meet people, it doesn’t work out. You think it’s end game, but it’s not. But the common thread throughout your life is that best friend who’s always been there, they’ve seen everything, they know everything you know. You live in each other’s pockets. You’re like the same person. You’re practically sisters, and then, they’re gone. Gone.

“It’s having to navigate that. The way my friendship ended with this person wasn’t very straightforward. I felt like I didn’t get closure. I tried to do everything in my power to help that person, be there for them and prove to them that my arms were always open and I was there if they needed me.

“I don’t think I could have said it enough, which is why, then, when the friendship ended and it went kind of sour, I was thinking, ‘how has that happened?’ I started questioning my sanity thinking, ‘Oh, my God, did I do something? Was I not good enough as a friend? Did I disappoint them in the friendship? Like, what the f*ck is that?’

“This song was really, really hard to write because I tiptoed around the lyrics a lot. It took me a long time to perfect the lyrics, because I wanted to be open, raw and honest and to the point, but at the same time, I didn’t want to be too bitchy. And there’s still hope in there. There was a fine line with this song.

“I did it with the McDonough brothers, who did Joji’s Glimpse of Us, probably one of my most listened to songs ever in the world. probably one of my most listened to songs ever in the world. I adore everything about it.

“When I recorded it, I wanted to make sure it was very intimate, because I’m telling a story about something so meaningful to me. You can hear every little imperfection in the vocal, and it sounds like the complete opposite to everything I’ve done with my other ballads. My other ballads are big and they’re belty, and I intentionally didn’t want to belt anything in this. I wanted it to be more delicate.

“It was very therapeutic, and so many people relate. So many of my friends and family have reached out to be like, ‘Oh my god, yeah, this is for my best friend that I don’t even talk to anymore’ and it’s like ‘God, it’s such a thing.'”

You Go Your Way

“This is a banger. It’s a Joy Anonymous track, and it was brought to me pretty early on. I just loved the energy of it, the chunkiness of it, and I love that we did the rock version of it. This song really got me in my feels, and I was so honoured they wanted me to take this song under my wing. I love doing this one live.”

Goodbye My Friend

“Goodbye My Friend is a love song to JADE and Leigh-Anne. It’s very cheesy, it’s very corny, but I don’t care, because I just love my girls!

“It’s about us going our separate ways. We have separate lives and separate paths at the moment but, if they ever needed me, I’m there. I love them so much I want to see them win. I love seeing them do well and be successful and happy in their lives. That’s all I want for them. They’re my sisters, so this song is dedicated to them.

“We’re always together, really. We’re always in sync, somewhere in the world. I love this song so much, it’s beautiful.”

Perrie’s debut album is released Friday September 26.