Ellie Goulding joined The Great Creators with Guy Raz podcast this week to discuss her musical journey, and how it shifted from pipedream to reality.
LISTEN NOW: The Great Creators with Guy Raz: Ellie Goulding
Singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding shot to the mainstream with her debut 2010 album, Lights, and has stayed in the public eye ever since. Singles like “On My Mind”, “Anything Could Happen,” and her most recent single “Miracle” put Goulding at the top of the music scene as the British female with the most U.K. chart hits of all time. Despite that massive record, Goulding revealed that she never believed she would end up as a musician, let alone a successful one.
“I didn’t think realistically that I could ever make it in music,” she sighed. “It was drummed into me that it just wouldn’t happen, by friends, by family. And actually, at the time, why would it? I was just, I didn’t think I was anything special.” Goulding described herself as an anxious and shy child, which would turn out to be early signs of her anxiety disorder. “I was never the one that was singing and dancing in the class, but I was always the one that wanted to,” she told interviewer Guy Raz. “In my head, I was like, ‘I should be singing, I should be dancing.’”
While she did pursue music as a child and in high school, the idea of pursuing true musicianship had just briefly occurred to her in college. She recalled, “It was only really when I got to university, that when I started playing my songs to people, I’d sort of go around to one of the student houses or student halls, play some songs. I felt like I was being heard for the first time really…It was like they heard me in a different way than how I’d been heard before. And I started to feel like maybe I did have something.”
Goulding attended the University of Kent, where she found relief from her anxiousness and worry through singing, to a point where she became, “a different person”. “That’s what people tell me when I perform, it’s like I turn into a completely different character, and it’s kind of my safe place,” she explained. “It became quite addictive to sing to people and feel that free and that calm and safe.”
The 36-year-old hitmaker then found herself pursuing music seriously, and eventually, left the University of Kent without graduating. “Actually when I think about it now, that was a real risk that I took,” Goulding nervously chuckled, as she remembered moving to London and couch surfing, continuing, “The steps I took so often lead to failure.” That is until record companies and publishers expressed interest in her open mic nights. “Something seemed to just come together, like frequencies were just aligning or something,” Goulding said. “I got to a point of exhaustion that was kind of working in my favor. Because I was trying so hard for a year doing open mic nights, and I think I kind of started to give up slightly, accepted that nothing was happening… and then it seemed to work.”
And work it did! Ellie Goulding is now celebrating the release of her fifth studio album, Higher than Heaven, which has landed her the U.K. number one single and UK number one album at the same time. To hear more of her compelling story, check out her conversation on The Great Creators with Guy Raz podcast on Audacy.
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