When Robin Thicke was in the studio last summer with Pharrell Williams, he never imagined that they’d be creating a monster hit. “We felt like maybe it was something special but it was so different,” Thicke told Radio.com earlier this year of his single “Blurred Lines.” “We didn’t know it would be this big.” His first No. 1, this week “Blurred Lines” reigns at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart for the seventh time. The track has been at No. 1 longer than any other song this year on the chart, giving Thicke another reason to celebrate. Not only has “Blurred Lines” been hailed by many as the song of the summer, but his new album, of the same name, will drop next Tuesday (July 30). With the buzz that “Blurred Lines” has created, Thicke is grateful for all the attention he’s been receiving.
“What’s changed about my image the most with the song is that people actually know who I am now,” he said. “People in the business might have known about me here or there, but the average person wouldn’t necessarily have known who I was or what my music was. When something this big happens, everybody goes, ‘Hey, that’s Robin Thicke!’ That’s cool.” Thicke’s release just may make him a household name. On Blurred Lines, Thicke enlisted the help of several producers including will.i.am, Timbaland and Dr. Luke.
“I’ve always written and produced my own music. My last album didn’t sell very well, in fact not at all,” he confessed. “I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I’m just being selfish and I want all the credit and I want everybody to love me and know how great I am and all this BS.’ And then I realized, this time, I’m not going to do it all on my own, I’m going to hire some of the great hit makers in the business and try to make some music everybody can enjoy instead of just my small fan base.” One of those hit-makers, Pharrell, was the mastermind behind “Blurred Lines.”
“In the studio, Pharrell and I started jamming,” Thicke said. “One of the first things Pharrell did was go, ‘Hey, hey, hey!’ and then we started having such a great time. We were dancing around the studio like old men. We were doing our old men barbecue dances.” Blurred Lines merges Thicke’s night life and home life. One track in particular, “4 The Rest Of My Life” is an ode to he and his wife’s relationship. “It’s about how my wife and I fell in love as teenagers,” he explained of his wife, actress Paula Patton. “It tells the story about how I saw her for the first time and how we fell in love and then how we broke up because I did some bad things.”
A year later they reunited and started dating again and Thicke credits her as “the best thing that ever happened to me.” Another track, “Ain’t No Hat 4 That” further showcases the family man’s priorities as he co-wrote the track with his dad, actor Alan Thicke and his three-year-old son Julian guests on vocals. While Thicke admits his previous releases have showcased his “introspective, brooding and soul-searching” sound, on this album he just wanted to make other people’s lives better. “Almost all of my songs are like a diary. This time, with this album, I scrapped some of that and decided really just to make fun songs that everybody can sing along to and dance to,” he said. “I just want to write stuff that makes people feel good.” Thicke’s sixth studio album, Blurred Lines, will be released July 30 by Interscope.