Pharrell Williams "forced" Ariana Grande to write about the Manchester terror attack.
The 25-year-old singer was left devastated last May when a suicide bomber unleashed an explosion shortly after her concert at the Manchester Arena – killing 23 people, including children, and injuring 139 – but, although her anxiety was through the roof afterwards, the ‘Happy’ hitmaker encouraged her to pen ‘Get Well Soon’ as a tribute to the victims.
Speaking to Paper magazine, she said: "Overall, [Pharrell] kind of forced it out of me because I was in a really bad place mentally. I’ve always had anxiety, I’ve had anxiety for years. But when I got home from tour it reached a very different, intense peak.
"[Pharrell] was like, ‘You have to write about it. You need to make this into music and get this sh*t out, and I promise it will heal you.’ And it definitely helped."
Ariana’s new album ‘Sweetener’ also features a love song she penned for her fiance Pete Davidson, whom she got engaged to in June after a few weeks of dating, and she has admitted she wrote the track just a week after they started getting to know one another.
She said recently: "’Pete Davidson’ is obviously inspired by my fiancé, I wrote this song like a week after we started hanging out. Sometimes when you feel a certain way about something and you can’t express it with words as well as you can with music, then I sent it to him. I want this song to live forever as music lives forever."
The LP also contains a collaboration with her "big sister" Nicki Minaj.
She explained: "So ‘The Light is Coming’ features Nicki Minaj who is my big sister and one of my best friends that I’ve met through this industry. I love the message behind it, it’s about people who can be so close minded or to blind-sided by their own opinion to find the truth."
Pharrell Williams ‘forced’ Ariana Grande to write about bombing
