Ellie Goulding has credited her music for helping her through her heartbreak over the end of her marriage.
The 38-year-old singer has returned to the spotlight with new track Destiny, her first solo release since her 2023 album Higher Than Heaven, and admitted getting back into the studio helped her slowly feel stronger in the wake of splitting from Caspar Jopling.
She told NME: “It doesn’t matter how strong a character you have, when it comes to separating from your husband, you can never be strong enough for that. It’s like a grieving process because you’ve lost not just the person, but the life that was projected for you.
“It was a long process, and it felt really triumphant to start waking up in the morning and, little by little, starting to feel it less. It’s never gone away, and only time will tell if it ever will… but it’s been a process of everyday feeling a little bit better.
“That to me was such a victory. To be able to channel things like that into poetry and lyrics, and then put it into songs like Destiny, it just felt like a triumph.
“I felt proud that I’d taken these steps to feel myself again. We’re never gonna escape pain; we have to use it for good and make it into something.”
Ellie – who has four-year-old son Arthur with her ex-husband – admitted she “didn’t know what else to do” apart from turn to music to overcome her heartbreak.
She said of her new single: “I first heard this track when I had recently separated from my husband. This was at a really turbulent time for me because I was trying to navigate what felt like a separation of all separations.
“It was a marriage, not just a relationship. I didn’t know what else to do other than make music.
“So I saw Jack Rochon, who was producing mostly trap music at the time, playing guitar on Instagram in such a beautiful way that I was immediately fixated. So I DM’ed him saying I wanted to work with him, and we met up that same day to start the journey.”