Ellie Goulding is the proud mom to son Arthur Ever Winter Jopling, whom she welcomed in May 2021. But in a new interview, she reveals she was “in denial” about her pregnancy as she was working on her new album, Higher Than Heaven, due out February 3.
Speaking with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, Ellie explains she wrote most of the album after the COVID pandemic lockdown, during which she and everyone she was working with was “in this kind of strange haze of the fact that we’d all been forced into this very strange situation … everyone seemed to be on the same page that they wanted this escape from reality.”
And Ellie wanted to escape from the reality that she and her husband, Caspar, were expecting their first child. “I was pregnant and I was desperately … I was in denial about being pregnant,” she reveals. “Trying to be like, ‘It’s nothing,’ and just hiding it.”
“That was kind of part of my defense mechanism that I just wanted to escape … it’s a scary thing, finding out you’re having a child,” she says. And that feeling ended up influencing the entire album.
“That’s exactly what this album is. It requires a certain amount of pain to go through to write what I write,” she tells Zane. “This album is ultimate escapism about being completely, insanely in love. There’s a lot of sexuality in there.”
She adds, “It’s almost like a psilocybin-induced love.” In case you’re not familiar, psilocybin is the psychedelic compound found in so-called magic mushrooms. Maybe that’s why the album’s called Higher Than Heaven?
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