On third album Delirium, Ellie Goulding captures the first flush of new love
Ethereal British singer and multi-instrumentalist has gone from EDM chanteuse to grandiose balladeer – and has cracked America thanks to Fifty Shades of Grey
Ellie Goulding wrote one of the biggest hits of her career for Fifty Shades of Grey, but she’s actually never seen the S&M romance.
“I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had a chance to watch it. I’m sure I will,” says Goulding, 28, whose Love Me Like You Do appears in the film. “It’s one of those movies you can’t really watch on an aeroplane. Certainly if people recognised me, I’d get a bit embarrassed watching certain scenes.”
Love Me, which Goulding had never planned to release as a single, took off on its own from the Fifty Shades soundtrack – selling 2.5 million downloads to date, according to Nielsen Music. The grandiose ballad is now included on Goulding’s third album Delirium, which was released last Friday, in which the dance music darling proves her mettle as a pop star.
Goulding – who performed in Hong Kong in August last year – started writing Delirium shortly after the release of second album Halcyon in 2012, but “the songs were still quite sad and from a dark place”, she says. That changed when she went to Los Angeles last year and hit the studio with top-notch producers “who wanted something to come out that hadn’t before”.