Ellie Goulding’s “favourite things” to write about are “love and heartbreak”.
The Black Prada Dress hitmaker has teased her upcoming new album, I Know Too Much, is her most honest piece of work yet and suggested it will go into the breakdown of her marriage to Caspar Jopling and how she found love again with actor Beau Minniear.
Speaking on an upcoming episode of Later… with Jools Holland, she said of the record’s title track: “It’s probably the most honest song I’ve written.
“It is what it is. I know too much. It’s tongue in cheek, but it’s also some kind of comment on my life so far, and music.
“I couldn’t think of a more apt title for everything I was singing about. I do know too much. Way too much.
“I always like to write about love and heartbreak.
“Those are my favourite things to write about.
“I got in the room with so many incredible songwriters and we just talked for a few hours.
“We all had stuff we wanted to talk about, to sing about . . . with some kind of despair about what is going on in the world.
“We then decided to go back to writing about love, people we love, people we’ve lost . . . ”
While Ellie – who has Arthur, five, with Caspar, and two-month-old Iris with Beau – was inspired to get back into the recording studio when she got pregnant again, she admitted she can’t even remember working on the music she made after giving birth to her son and felt like a “robot” during those recording sessions.
She said: “Music and performing is the thing that keeps me going. I have two children now so the first time I went back in the studio, I was kind of a robot.
“I made this 2023 album called Higher Than Heaven and I don’t remember it.
“Any woman that’s had a baby can relate to that postnatal phase of, ‘What the hell just happened to me?’. So I wrote all this music.
“Someone heard a song from it the other day and was like, ‘I thought this was AI, that’s the new thing’. And I was like, kind of, because I was like a robot and didn’t know what I was doing for a time.”
But the Burn singer is confident things will be different this time.
She added: “Now I’m much more human and I have done it already, so this time around I’m a lot more equipped to get back into that mindset.”