Although Lily Allen’s evocative new album, West End Girl, reflects on the unraveling of her marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour, the singer confirmed she doesn’t still feel “confused or angry” about the situation.
In a conversation with Mel Ottenberg for Interview magazine, Allen explained that her album isn’t about getting back at her ex. Ottenberg asked of the LP, “Should we call it a revenge tour?”
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“It isn’t,” Allen replied. “I mean, I wrote this record in 10 days in December and I feel very differently about the whole situation now. We all go through breakups and it’s always fucking brutal. But I don’t think it’s that often that you feel inclined to write about it while you’re in it.”
She added, “That’s what’s fun about this record; it’s viscerally like going through the motions. At the time, I was really trying to process things and that’s great in terms of the album, but I don’t feel confused or angry now. I don’t need revenge.”
The singer explained that some of West End Girl is “based on truth and some of it is fantasy.” She explained, “It’s not a cruel album. I don’t feel like I’m being mean. It was just the feelings I was processing at the time.”
Ottenberg asked how she managed to get out of a broken heart. “I think it’s just getting out and socializing,” she said. “I’m guilty of putting all of it on one person when I’m in a relationship. So when that person leaves, I feel completely bereft and it takes me a while to be like, ‘Actually, I can rely on friends for some of this stuff as well.’”
Allen also admitted to being on dating apps following her breakup from Harbour, which she said was difficult to do as a woman in the public eye. “They’re awful, especially if you’re going through heartbreak,” she noted. “There is nothing more depressing than hundreds of people that are nothing like the person that you’re missing. … I’m not really looking to go out with another famous person.”
She said she was actually banned from Hinge “for impersonating myself,” but she is still on Raya. Allen added that she is currently not dating anyone specific. “I’m not in a relationship, but there are some people that I meet up with,” she said.
Allen and Harbour married in 2020. West End Girl marks her first new album in seven years, following 2018’s No Shame. It features 14 tracks recorded in Los Angeles over 10 days with her music director Blue May late last year before completing it between New York and London.
“The record is vulnerable in a way that my music perhaps hasn’t been before – certainly not over the course of a whole album,” Allen said in a statement, adding, “I’ve used shared experiences as the basis for songs which try to delve into why we humans behave as we do, so the record is a mixture of fact and fiction which I hope serves as a reminder of how stoic yet also how frail we humans can be. In that respect I think it’s very much an album about the complexities of relationships and how we all navigate them.”
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