S: Let’s go ahead and talk about ‘Candy Shop’. You chose it to be the first on the album. Why? M: I think ‘Candy Shop’s’ one of my favourite records and it sort of personifies the mood that I was in when I was making the record which is kind of cheeky, wanting to have fun, liking the idea of having a play on words. Wanting to dance. Lots of innuendo. I don’t know. Yeah.
I put it first ’cause it’s also is a kind of an illustration of the variety of songs that are on the record ’cause when you go into a candy shop, you can get so many different things. And hopefully you can get that when you listen to the record. There’s more serious songs. There’s more fun songs. There’s more up tempo songs. There’s more thoughtful songs. So, yeah.
S: And that goes right into another fantastic track. And there’s so much going on and so many layers on ‘Give It To Me’… I was trying to write down some lines from it. There’s just almost too much to… M: Yeah. ‘Give It To Me’ is like the ultimate anthem kind of song. I think that will be a really great song to do live. Yeah. It’s sort of, you can just see everybody, the whole room jumping. And it’s the ultimate like sort of, you know, just do it. You know what I mean? Give me all you’ve got, don’t try to stop me. I think it’s a great song to work out to. (laugh)
S: And what’s the one line, ‘You’re Only Here To Win’? M: Absolutely.
S: ‘Cause it’s definitely sort of upbeat and joyous too.
M: Yeah. Well, that’s how I felt that day in the studio with Pharrell and, I think by the time we got to that stage of the record we’d already written several songs together. We just decided we needed to make some crazy up tempo dance song and ‘Give It To Me’ was the result. Yeah.
S: It could almost work in any setting. It’s a great pop melody and structure as a pop song. How did it come together in this form? M: Um, I don’t know. I mean, honestly, I didn’t over-think how we were gonna to come up with a song. We just wanted to write catchy melodies and I think Pharrell’s quite genius at coming up with music that has a lot of crossover appeal, you know. It could be kind of R&B. It’s sort of pop. It’s, you could hear it on the radio. You could hear it in a club. Um, so we just, like I said, we just wanted to write songs that you couldn’t get out of your head.
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