The biggest mistake Pharrell made with his debut album: “I beat myself up about that”
Pharrell Williams is a chart-topping, multi-Grammy-award-winning, ultra-wealthy superstar, but it wasn’t always so. He had to find his feet as a musician like anyone else, and he’s the first to admit that he made mistakes along the way.
Before songs like ‘Get Lucky,’ ‘Happy,’ and ‘Blurred Lines,’ Pharrell was probably most famous for his production work for other artists. As part of the Neptunes, he made beats for Jay-Z, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Snoop Dogg.
But, even though he was working with the biggest stars around, he still held a desire to step into the limelight himself. The problem is that it wasn’t really happening for him, as he spoke to Oprah about on her Oprah Prime show in 2014.
“That kept getting rained on,” he said of his dreams of being the main man. “I had accepted that I was going to be a writer and producer and I was happy to be the guy standing next to the guy.”
Despite becoming a musician in the early ’90s, it was only in 2006 that he truly announced himself as a solo artist in his own right. His debut album, In My Mind, was released that year, and it went straight to number three on the Billboard 200 chart. It wasn’t a bad result, but, even so, Pharrell has its regrets about the record.
Pharrell noted to Oprah that In My Mind had “more braggadocio in it than there was purpose and intention.” This was something he looked back on now with a degree of unease. “I beat myself up about that,” he admitted, “because I was like, ‘Here you are, being given a platform and all you want to do is brag.’”
Pharrell had been following along with some of his most successful contemporaries of the era, people like Jay-Z and Diddy. Those two weren’t afraid to show off in their songs, but, as Pharrell came to understand later, their bragging was different to what he was doing at the time.
“Jay and Puff were like my peers and I wanted to be like them,” Pharrell said. “I misinterpreted what Jay was doing… He was serving his purpose, but… the only thing I was paying attention to was the pixie dust and the magic trick, and not the purpose.”
Pharrell believed that his bragging was merely “aesthetic,” as opposed to what his peers, at their best, were doing. Their bragging had more backbone, and he felt that he’d failed to match it.