Pharrell Williams Confesses His Massive Hit ‘Happy’ Was Actually Born Out of Sarcasm

Pharrell Williams is opening up his own emotions about the creative process behind his hit 2013 track “Happy.”

In an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music 1 ahead of the release of his biographical film Piece by Piece, the Neptunes co-founder discussed his approach to one of his biggest hits, “Happy.”

“When I was about 40, that’s when ‘Get Lucky,’ ‘Blurred Lines,’ ‘Happy,’ all of that was the same year,” the 51-year-old multihyphenate recalls regarding his collaborations with Daft Punk and Robin Thicke, respectively. “And these were all songs that were more commissions than they were just like, I woke up one day and decided I’m going to write about X, Y and Z.”

During the interview, Williams recalled completing the soundtrack for the children’s film Despicable Me 2, created with Heitor Pereira, and running out of ideas. He asked himself, “How do you make a song?” and inspiration struck.

“It was only until you were out of ideas and you asked yourself a rhetorical question and you came back with a sarcastic answer. And that’s what ‘Happy’ was,” Williams said. “How do you make a song about a person that’s so happy that nothing can bring them down? And I sarcastically answered it and put music to it, and that sarcasm became the song. And that broke me.”

“Happy” has become one of the best-selling songs in history with over 13.9 million copies sold. Per Forbes and CNN, the track also went on to be declared the most-played song on British radio in the 2010s and even held the record for longest music video at one point, sitting at 24 hours long until Twenty One Pilots smashed the record in 2020 with a 177-day-long video.

Elsewhere in the conversation with Lowe, 51, Williams discussed his forthcoming film, Piece by Piece, with director Morgan Neville, who also helmed the Mr. Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

The unconventional biographical film depicts Williams and his life story in Lego animation.

Neville, 57, explained that the collaborative process for the film was also different: “The thing that was different than say a normal documentary is normally somebody shares their story with you and then you figure out how to tell it, which I did, but then I showed it back to Pharrell and then he started writing songs based on my view of his story. And then it became this kind of circular conversation, creatively then about the entire film.”

Neville also convinced Williams to include his family in the film.

In a conversation with PEOPLE at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, the “Get Lucky” singer said, “I was on the fence. I didn’t know if I really wanted to have my family in it, but, again, I turned everything over to him, so I followed his direction.”

Piece by Piece is in theaters Friday, Oct. 11 and features Gwen Stefani, Kendrick Lamar, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake and more voicing Lego minifigure versions of themselves.