Producer Blue May on the Making of Lily Allen’s Buzzy ‘West End Girl’

Occasionally a producer or writer who is known primarily to music insiders suddenly emerges with a calling card that puts the wider world on notice. For Blue May, that card is Lily Allen’s “West End Girl,” an astonishing album that may not just be one of the year’s best but be thought of as one of the decade’s best, when these 10 years are all said and done. Whether it registers as a commercial blockbuster or not, it is certainly as truly buzzy as a record gets. And if most of the chatter is about the revelations Allen seems to be making from one moment to the next about chagrinning events in her personal life, the delivery system for all those riveting thoughts is a full album’s worth of deliriously brilliant pop music, forged by a team led by May as executive producer.

Is it the kind of leap that could result in a producer of the year nomination for May at the 2027 Grammys, given that “West End Girl” came out just past the close of eligibility for the current cycle? It may seem wild to project that big that far ahead, but based on the universal acclaim for Allen’s album, it’s a certainty that other big music stars will come calling even if the Grammys don’t. “West End Girl” represents a kind of perfect storm of jaw-dropping candor and equally awe-inspiring musicality that does everyone proud, whether it’s May making a name for himself in the mainstream pop arena or Allen reestablishing her own with a record that may be even stronger than the ones that established her in the 2000s.

Variety visited the Brit-turned-Angeleno in the exact spot where “West End Girl” was made, in his home in the Hollywood hills, where most of the rooms have become adaptable into recording studio spaces. He offered a fuller perspective than we’ve yet heard from anyone on the making of a pop masterpiece. (The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.)

Is there anything that has shocked you about the reaction to “West End Girl,” apart from how much people just love it?

There’s a part of the discourse on the internet that thinks that we sampled the “Strangers Things” intro on “Pussy Palace.” (Some thought they heard this as a supposed allusion to David Harbour being an alleged subject of the album’s lyrics.) And if you listen to the two things, you can’t… I’m like, whoa, man. We didn’t! There was not enough time to be that meta about things, you know?

Just as far as how people actually loved it has affected you, that must be exciting for you on all levels, from the positive reaction to the work itself to, we have to imagine, the phone ringing with a lot of work prospects, now that people know what you’re capable of as a producer.

It has been thoroughly enjoyable and, honestly, completely overwhelming. I haven’t had to deal with this kind of noise or this kind of internet thing, and I feel grateful that it’s taken me 20 years to get here and that I’m nearly 40, because I don’t think I would’ve been able to deal with this when I started out in my early twenties. When I got to produce my first major-label artist, it was a complete failure. I didn’t know how to hold the pressure of A&R people and the manager and still represent the artist. In the last 10 years I have managed to have records out that I think stand up, and to make critically good records for important eyes, of which none of those have reached this kind of a critical mass connection. So arriving at this point now…

It’s a record I’ve been chasing for five years with a friend of mine, someone I really care about. If I’ve been convinced of anything for five years, it’s that Lily can still make her best record. Or whether it’s best or not doesn’t matter — it’s make great work that connects with people. I don’t want to make music for a small audience. I want to make pop music and want to reach as many people as possible. And if you overlook an artist like Lily Allen as someone who couldn’t make a splash at any given point in her career, this feels vindicating. To have been able to say it to a lot of people who didn’t agree with me, necessarily, and see it through feels amazing.

And then to be right in this moment where it’s exceeded my highest expectations, I know that there’s a lot more people looking at me and willing to open the door to me. All that rings around in my head as wanting to certainly make the most of it and strike when the iron is hot, but absolutely to stick to the methods that I’ve spent 20 years developing. Which is: I can’t make music with anyone unless I can sit with them for a pretty extended period before we even make any music. I need to be able to be given the freedom to do that, like I did with Lily. And one reason we were able to do that was because this record was made in secrecy. The label did not commission this record. The label didn’t know about this album until we played it to them finished and mixed. No one got paid any advances before we started. Everyone I asked to come and join us on this record had to understand that they were coming in and taking a spin at this with us. and I don’t think there’s any other way this record could have been made than to not have anyone else involved.

But it’s not that I’m expecting that every opportunity I get is gonna be direct one-to-one with an artist, and we just make the record: “By the way, guys, here’s an album!” I know there’s gonna be other people involved, but if people can’t give me the opportunity to sort of build a bit of a castle around the project and go deep with someone, then I just don’t think it’s for me. And I’m very wary of taking the wrong offers and opportunities right now, for sure.

I think as some of us were listening to the album the first time, we were thinking: This is riveting beyond relief — but will it have repeat value? Is it too tied to all the drama and emotion and narrative to just enjoy on an everyday level? And then, going back to it, it’s like, no, actually, this music hits you in all the pleasure centers, whether you’re still paying close attention to the subject matter or not.

Yeah. I’d hoped for that. I’ve seen on the internet this sense that, for the first three or four rounds, everyone’s like, “Oh my God, oh my God! What the fuck? Oh my God.” And then actually a lot of people say that it’s now sort of settled into where they can listen to it and not have to be so wrapped up in the lyric, and it can actually exist in the background as well. To me, with pop music, if you can do that, man, that’s the bullseye. It’s like, move people, scare people, shock people, put them on the edge, make them cry, make them laugh, make ’em do all that kind of stuff. And then hopefully, eventually, that piece of work can become something that can just exists as a part of people’s lives that doesn’t always have to be a heavy listen.

But also, any listener, if they suddenly years down the line go through something in a relationship, they might go, “My God, this experience I’m having is starting to sort of mirror that a little bit… maybe I should go back and listen to that record” — whether they’re going through it or whether they’re about to go through it and they’re like, “Whoa, no, I’ve gotta push the brakes.” Then maybe they can reconnect with it being a moving, deep, heavy piece of work again. I think hopefully it can operate in all sorts of different spaces, you know?

Can you talk about the five years you spent wanting to make a record with Lily, and trying to, and not succeeding, before this project suddenly blossomed?

Lily’s and my history before we made this record is, I worked as her creative director on the end of the last album, so I helped design the touring for promoting “No Shame” (in 2018). Musically, I think that record is a really good record, and Lily’s always honest in her lyrics. But the reason I decided to help her out and work with her on the tour was not because I was that drawn into that album, but more because I was told that she’d had such a difficult time touring before. It had always been the root of some big spirals in her life when she’d sort of gone off on tour. So I had this first feeling towards her of “OK, well, I think I know how to put a good bunch of people around her and give her an experience that’s not hopefully as awful as that.” And so, initially the sort of trust between us I think just came from wanting her to kind of be OK. And then when we both emerged unscathed from that whole period, we started talking about writing music together.

My thing to her, and I don’t think she’d mind me saying this, is I just always said to her, “Lily, I really want to make a record of you, but I really wanna get back to the early DNA of your music.” I wanted to give her the confidence in the value of the thing that she concocted 20 years ago. In our four years of conversation leading up to us actually making a record, I knew I wanted to self-reference back to a place of, like, she generally writes in major keys. Generally, the songs we all gravitate towards with Lily, there’s the sort of nursery-rhymey sort of playfulness, and I couldn’t use those kind of melodies or sounds with any other artist I’ve ever worked with, but for some reason with her it works. There’s a little bit of musical theater and that kind of stuff. In juxtaposition with that is the fucking absolute knife to the heart of the subject matter of her lyrics, which are so sharp and brutal and self-deprecating. The lyrics could be very crude about the subject as well, and for a woman to do that, there’s not too many examples before her that did it quite as straight as she did.

But the other side to that is that I definitely didn’t want her to think that she had to pretend to be 20 years old again and talk about the same thing she cared about 20 years ago. I want to hear stories from 40-year-olds. I want to hear what Lily Allen’s saying as a 40-year-old, as a mom of two. I didn’t have any idea we’d end up making a record that was just on one subject, or a record that was chronological. But I definitely wanted that sort of sweet voice and that sweet melody and the sort of theatrical sort of fun songs that are fun to listen to that you want to go back and back and back to, but mixed with exactly what she was going through right now. And I think we did that.

I think one of the liberating things for us on this record was that we wrote probably the saddest song on the first day.

Which was “Just Enough,” right? Which is a very straightforward ballad in its heartbreak. It’s just stark. Was it important to establish the truly sadcore part of the record as a foundation, before you were able to get playful or inject humor into other parts of it?

“Just Enough” was written the first three hours. Lily came on the first day and we sat out here on the deck, where we are now, for two hours. She completely poured out her experiences, and then was like, “Here’s the song titles — let’s write a record about it, and let’s do it in chronological order.” And she talked about that classic song, “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and the line “Fools rush in.” As soon as she said “Fools rush in,” I was like, I can see the picture of the whole thing. But then, you know, she was really upset the first day. Obviously, she was upset at different times — she was fucking fragile. And it was just lucky that we were in a room of me and Chloe Angelides and Kito, and we wrote that first song. I think the only song that could have come out first was the song of complete despair. And that vocal is the original vocal. We tried to redo it several times; it’s pretty fucking rough. When we came to the end of that song, that was written in its entirety two hours.

And the next song we wrote was “Tennis,” after that; we did “Just Enough” and “Tennis” in the first day. So by the end of the first day, we had the deepest heartbreak. I’m like, there’s probably only space for one ballad on a record. I’m not thinking that we’re gonna go and write 10 more. You know, I want to write a pop record with her. But we’d also written “Tennis,” which to me is probably the most out-and-out pastiche of her early work. There’s a chord change from the verse to the chorus that is a major shift. There’s a key change in the chorus that feels like a pastiche of Lily Allen. It almost feels like someone trying to make a Lily Allen record, but we did it for Lily Allen. And the “Tennis” story is heartbreaking, but it’s also funny. So we got to the end of day one and I was like, “Oh my God. We’ve got potentially a single and the saddest moment of the record in the first day. We’re free now. We can fill in every blank, between one extreme and the other.”

There are a lot of co-writers and co-producers on this album, and you were dealing with situations with a lot of people in your home studio here. You established a lot of personal trust at first and then there were a lot of other people who came on to help enact that. Is it easy to stay focused on the super-personal stuff in a group situation?

Well, the backstory of that is that, for one thing, I’ve never made a record like that before. I’m generally someone who is just in a room with the artist and I’ve not done big writer rooms. The reason we put that together like that is because I’d tried to make an album with Lily two years ago, where I went to New York for two months at the end of 2022, and I stayed in an apartment in Manhattan and built a studio in there. I was really trying to recreate what I imagined the setup would have been of how she wrote her first two records, with just her and a couple of producers. And it was a complete failure. I was there for six weeks, and I don’t think we wrote one good song in six weeks. I remember her telling me the stories of how she wrote her first two records, and especially the second record with Greg Kurstin. At one point she was like, “Oh yeah, we got a country house somewhere in England and we wrote it all in two weeks.” We’d already been failing to make this record, and I was like, “Oh my God, I’m fucking awful. I’m so shit.” And when I eventually left New York, I said to Lily, “I’m gonna go, because I don’t think this is the right time to do this. But I hope that we get to have another go at some point when the time is right for all of us.” And obviously I could tell that Lily was feeling very blocked. I also don’t feel like I necessarily put the right things in front of her to shift that block.

As I was picking over that 2022 session, it really occurred to me that Lily had never written a record sober before. And I think when she wasn’t sober, there was this confidence that she could throw ideas out in the room. You know, it always amazes me how enormous artists can be insecure about how well they can sing, how well they can write. At that time she definitely lacked confidence with singing in the room, and I think not having the crutch of alcohol and drugs made that so loud. When we were in New York, she couldn’t do it, even just in front of me or a couple of people. So there was a lesson I learned.

Eventually, she was passing through L.A. in the summer of last year. We had dinner, and it was the first time she’d started to tell me a bit about what she’d been going through in her personal life. At the end of that dinner she was like, “I think I’m kind of getting to a place where I’m ready to write. If you’re still interested, I’d love to try it out with you.” Then she phoned me about a month later and was like, “OK, I want to do it. Should we put some time in? What time have you got available?” And I said to her, “OK, cool. I’d love two things. One, can you come here to L.A.? Because I think you being out of your immediate day-to-day life and the commitments you have is gonna be better.” She doesn’t have to do this, you know — put her life out in the world again. When you are already a successful person, there is the temptation to just not do it and hide and go underground. When I was in New York in 2022, I think she’d just wake up and there’d be some reason why she could get out of it, like, “Oh, my daughter’s sick off school today and I can’t get the nanny to come around.” And I totally empathize with: Why should she have to do it? But I said to her, “Can you come to L.A.?” Because in my head I was like, there’ll just be less distractions, or less ability to find excuses in herself to not turn up to the studio.

The second thing I said to her was, “And I’m thinking that we should do more of a fleshed-out pop room and bring in writers and other producers.” It’s something she’d expressed an interest in before. I felt she needed a bunch of people to run with the idea, and almost be the people first people in the room to just put noise in the room, so she didn’t have to be the first one to go,”What would you think if I say this lyric or sing a melody?” So she’d tell us a story, and we’d start making sound. Chloe or Violet (Skies), who were the two main sort of top-liners in the room, would then kick into gear. They’re not un-confident with singing a melody in the room, or with singing a shit lyric. They’re songwriters who are trained that it’s their job to (just be OK with singing silly things into the room until something sticks. So that would allow us to form things quickly without Lily having to implicate herself in the sort of slightly difficult “is that good, is that bad.” Then at the point where there’d be a bit of a melody and a bit of a lyric or a bit of “this is the verse, this is the chorus,” then Lily would reemerge in the room, take these sort of pop co-write lyrics that were kind of about the subject matter but not in Lily’s words or language, and do this really quick editing process where she’d change lines, add lines, put in these punchlines — you know, some of the raw things that she said in this record. Like, there’s no songwriter in this world that would turn around and be like, “What about if you said, ‘I didn’t know it was your pussy palace’? Or what about if we say ‘butt plugs’ in the song?” No songwriter is gonna tell an artist to say that. Lily is reading through these blocks of different ideas for lyrics, and then putting her own voice into that. She’ll be like, “Lemme just put it down. Lemme just scratch on the mic.” Even when she would take all the melodies that had been sung in the room, she’d also totally put her own cadence on it immediately, and do these turns of melody that only she does. And then she’ll sing these Lily-fied lyrics, and you’re just like, “Oh my God, this is a Lily Allen record.” And then we’d refine things. But Lily would get excited and then she would fucking make it hers. And that’s the root of how most of these songs came together, which I think was a good experiment.

Especially when you’re a professional songwriter or a professional producer in L.A., it’s like you’re in the copy room; you’re just peeling that one off and peeling that one off and seeing which one sticks. So to be brought back down to earth and handed an artist that was in this incredibly heightened emotional moment in her life, but also on the other hand just so willing to kind of expose it all, I think from the writers’ point of view it was just an “Oh, man, this is what it’s all about” kind of vibe. It was a really beautiful time — as much as it was a hard and adrenaline-fueled and confronting time as well.

There were these two main rooms going in the house— we’d have the sort of me/Kito/Chloe/Lily room that also had Leroy Clampitt coming in and out of it. And then I also had the Jeremy (Malvin)/Chrome Sparks/Micah Jasper/Violet Skies/Lily room. So I’d do a couple of days here and then I’d go to Jeremy’s for a day and we’d come back and it was “Check this one out.”

We’ve heard about how quickly this album was done… that the majority of it was written and recorded in one fruitful 10-day stint at the end of 2023, with a little bit of follow-up work in the new year. Can you explain how you got this rich an album, starting almost from scratch, coming in with no songs?

That first 10-day stint was at the start of December last year. How it started on the first day is: The night before she came for the first day of the sessions, she had written down 18 song titles that were telling the chronological story of what she’d just been through for the last five years. We worked from those song titles; she hadn’t written anything else. So how the process would be for every song is that at the start of the day, we’d all come in and settle down, I’d say to Lily, “Are you drawn to any of these titles or any of these subject matters today?” And she’d go, “Yeah, actually, I kind of feel like I want to tell this story today”  — some of the titles changed by the end — and then she’d tell us absolutely gory details about the story. Then we’d start making sounds based on what that might feel like, or what might be a good sort of soundtrack for that kind of thing…

At the end of the first 10 days, we had worked our way through 14 of those titles, but she still had four more titles. We were like, “Right, we want to hit all of these.” But it was gonna be Christmas and New Year’s, and she had planned to go into a sort of rehab center in January. So literally the nearest next available time was February. She and I went and got a coffee in Los Feliz and were looking at each other, going, “We’re really doing this right now, aren’t we?” As in: “We’re not gonna drag this out for six months. We’ve got these 14 songs in the first 10 days. The next time you come back, we are gonna find the missing songs and we’re gonna finish the whole record.” So we blocked out a month in February, and when we came back, the first two weeks were designated to be trying to get those last four songs — but actually we got them in the first two days. And so I actually canceled sessions with other writers because we had kind of closed out the record. And the last two songs we wrote were the first two songs on this record.

So did you end up getting rid of four songs to get it down from 18 to 14?

What happened a couple of times is that we actually managed to hit two topics in one song. She might have had two separate titles, but we ended up wrapping them into one song. Then originally there were meant to be two songs before how the album starts now. There was a whole plan to start the record a different way, and we recorded that, but Lily made the brilliant judgment that the record needed to start with “West End Girl,” so we canned those two. Then outside of that, there was one other song which we mostly finished, a song that was gonna go between “4Chan Stan” and “Nonmonogamummy,” but when we listened to the whole sequence with that song in it, I started to feel a little bit like we were staying in one space too long, so we edited it back a little bit.

It’s interesting that the last songs written for the album are the first in the running order, when it’s a chronological story being told. Why did it turn out that way?

Yeah, it is funny how we kind of ended, at the end, with the start. I think the reason why it went in that direction was because we were trying to get a song that talked about the short-lived period of the relationship that was happy. And actually the thing she found hardest to do was talk about that period.

“West End Girl” and “Ruminating” were both done in the same sessions with the same group of people. Other than me and Lily, the other two people in the room were new. And at this point we’d written the whole rest of the record with two kind of quite well-established groups of people. So to bring two completely new people in was in itself kind of a little bit nerve-wracking. And Lily had just come out of doing deep therapy work for a few weeks. I’d asked her if she was OK with us scheduling the first sessions back with completely new people. And she said she was, but actually when she arrived, she was in a much more difficult emotional state than even when she first arrived in December. She was a lot more fragile than she was back then. And those days writing “Ruminating” and “West End Girl” were in some ways the toughest writing days, even though we got great songs out of them.

I think if I was worried about anything from a purely critical standpoint of how people are gonna receive this album on a sort of purely production level, “West End Girl” is probably the one I was most worried about, because… it’s like bad music. It’s meant to be kind of lift music (elevator music), effectively. All the things where it speeds up and slows down and how it goes into the phone call, I really loved it when we made it, but I did wonder whether it was too much of a mood piece and worried about it starting the record. Because I think this record makes you wait a few songs until you get into a space that feels kind of normal, in a way, or something that’s palatable. I mean, I think it’s come across well, but I was definitely worried about throwing someone into a minute-and-a-half-long phone call in the first song.

It feels like a brilliant call — no pun intended — to have done that. If you hear that first track, you are in for the whole album, unless you don’t have a curious bone in your body. Whose idea was that, to have one side of a phone call in the song at all?

By that point, we’d already done that “Madeline” song, which felt like a “Jolene” sort of idea. She told us a story about the email to this person and getting an email back and this sort of funny exchange. At some point there, it was like, well, do you just read from that email, or… I don’t think I was imagining that Lily would do it, but as soon as the idea was in the room, it was like, OK, cool. We made some space for her and she just freestyled the whole Madeline part. We were like, Whoa, this is crazy! Like, Lily’s just acted it out completely in one take. She just put on this American accent and sort of pretended to be this person. And I guess that’s kind of the chorus of this song, where we were like, “OK, do we do it again at the end? OK, cool!” So we had this kind of theater piece in “Madeline.”

So when we ended up doing “West End Girl,” we already had this confidence that in places in the record we could maybe do this kind of theatrical break where you get so real with it. And with “West End Girl,” we’d written the basis of it, and it wasn’t a very structured song. It doesn’t feel like it’s got a defined chorus, and I don’t even think the chorus repeats itself. The whole song is a long stream of consciousness. And as you do in these kinds of sessions, you think, “Oh, do we need to sort of nail down a proper chorus? Do we need to structure this better?” But we knew we needed to get this moment.

There was the arriving-in-New-York thing, and I was really trying to push her to kind of sit in the love and the excitement, which was really hard for her. When we were writing that song, it was almost like she was the one pushing the wheels to come off really quickly, and I was almost pushing to say, no, we can just stay in this kind of loving dream. I was picturing the cartoon birds flying around her head. But she couldn’t help but want to rush towards the first moments of the cracks appearing.

Throughout this album, it was really important to understand why she was telling us these stories — where she was in all those moments. So with “West End Girl,” there’s two major locations in that song. It’s walking up to the new house they’ve bought. She told me the story that just as she was putting the key in the front door, the first time she walked into that house, she got a call at the same time from the person offering her a part in a play back in London. I think for her (it was symbolic), that very moment where you’ve got the key in one hand and the phone in the other. The key represents “be a housewife and almost give up on fame and just be the supporter of this other famous person,” and the phone call is like, “Hey, by the way, everyone’s still thinking about you. We’d love you to do this. It’s not quite what you’re known for, but we think you’d be great at it.” Lily’s an ambitious person. I think she’s always gonna be tempted by expressing herself. So there’s that point where then she tells the husband character, and he’s not happy for her, and that’s the first time it’s like, whoa. And then, being Lily, because she’s confident, because she has this gusto to go and throw herself into challenging situations and try new things like acting, she goes to London. So the next place was the London hotel room. She’s gone down her own road, despite the resistance. And then there was a phone call where there was a conversation about, “If you’re choosing to leave the home and be away, then I’m gonna need to express myself with other situations.”

When someone’s telling you a visceral story like that, obviously, normally when you’re writing songs, you’d sort of try and find metaphors. But by that point, we already made a whole record of pretty much zero metaphor. So it was kind of like, “Well, should we just do a phone call?” And, again, Lily freestyled that in one take. It was not concocted, particularly. When I was recording it, I’d made a bunch of space for her to freestyle this phone call, but I just kept on as she was recording, doubling it and doubling it, because she kept on going. I was thinking it would be something that would be about five seconds long. But then she just kept on going, perfectly spacing herself. None of that is edited. And I think this record was a continuous experience of recording it all and writing it all in a complete stream of consciousness. Like, oh my God, should we just do a phone call? And she’s like, “Yeah, yeah!” It was like: get the mic, hit record, no preparation — just her doing it.

And actually on nearly all the songs, after we’d play it back, we’d all be a bit like a “My God, what have we just done?” kind of thing. The first thing was always just to go for it, and the second was like, fucking hell!And she’d often become really emotional listening back to stuff, after the fact.

With the spoken emails you mentioned in “Madeline,” when you say that was freestyled, does that mean she was writing it on the spot? Some people have wondered if she was reading an actual email, and maybe not even making it up.

I do think it’s important that Lily is allowed the protection of what is real and what is not real on this record. I’ve seen it written about as being an “auto-fiction” kind of thing. I think for me, as she told her stories and said the words, I was in complete belief of everything that she was saying. And I never have wanted to pry too much into what’s real and what’s not real. But I do think the protection that allows Lily to at least exist in the idea that no one quite knows what’s real and what’s not real is important. And I think it’s important, in order for this work to exist, that that sort of layer has to exist as well.

So with the Madeline stuff, I think she had a very good memory of a feeling and an experience that, when that idea came up, it was something that she was capable of freestyling in one take. I think I’m probably OK to say that, right towards the end of the process, we did a round of cleaning things up to just make sure that we were not sort of saying real names and not saying things that would be kind of being problematic for Lily, in letting this music out.

Of course she has had a successful career as a stage actress in London these past few years. Something that’s fun, during “Tennis,” is just the half-dozen different ways she has of reading the line “And who’s Madeline?” — and eventually “And who the fuck is Madeline,” or “And who is Madeline, actually?” There’s wit and great timing in how she puts a slightly different spin on her reading of it each time. Obviously she’s been successful with music for 20 years, but you have to wonder if the stage acting experience has given her an extra ability to even think about those tiny bits of timing that give something an extra zing.

Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, she’s a genius and seeing her work in real time is incredible. There are all those moments where she really does things that leave everyone just completely taken aback in the room. I just think there’s certain people in this world that are born to be culturally central people. They are people that embody or interpret what life is and put it into these concentrated delivery methods of wrapping things up into a bow that I think end up being quite universal experiences… I think Lily’s one of the most complete people when it comes to the extreme of being willing to put her own experiences out in the open in a way that is just so super courageous and very “Fuck you.”

I even spoke to her in the studio, in moments of support, just going, “You know, I think the world needs your work.” And I understand that that’s a heavy thing to handle, because when you’ve had the life experience she’s had and the kind of feedback she’s had from the internet and any number of other people, that she’s got every reason to just never want to poke that bear again. But here she is poking it, kind of in a new way, but also in a kind of even more extreme way than maybe she’s ever done it before — but definitely similar to how she did it at the start in some way. That to me is the part of being a cultural icon, being the kind of artist actually that sort is willing to expose yourself. And I think the other part of being an artist or an entertainer is about being willing to dramatize. In order to get the message home and to tell the story, you’re not playing real life completely, are you? And there has to be some level of theater to everything. So when you’re talking about “Tennis,” the way she pronounces those words, or the little tone of phrases, I think Lily’s one of the most incredible people in understanding her viewer and understanding how to spin things in little ways that just kind of catch, catch, catch, and putting the acting slant on it.

Some of the humor or even implied humor comes not just through her delivery but what is in the music beds, which are sometimes played for irony.

A hundred percent. “Tennis,” to use an example, starts when she’s making dinner for everyone. He’s been away, he’s come back, and it’s like Sunday afternoon sort of background music, kind of homogenized, like if you left your Spotify on for too long on sort of soul playlist. The same with “West End Girl” and so many of the songs. And with “Madeline,” it’s a sort of shootout — that’s why there are these gun sounds: she’s riding off to go and chase down this secret lover. And yeah, it’s all theater.

“Dallas Major” is like that. She’s talking about going out and dating again and creating a dating profile — kind of “if you can’t beat ’em, join them. If I’m gonna be forced to experience this from the other side, then I better go and live it up myself.” And to me that bit of music is like being in a New York club in the ‘90s, sort of “Sex and the City,” with that sort of generic, funky, light disco, in those sort of like martini-glass kind of clubs… I always had this idea of seeing her in the video with all these different guys and this sort of speech bubble pops up and it’s like, “And that’s how I got into Bitcoin,” but in the background there’d be a DJ…

Then there’s other songs where it’s less about a place and more just about a feeling. With “Ruminating,” we’d done “West End Girl,” we knew the phone call was there, and then it’s like, fucking hell, now we’ve gotta explode. The husband character in this album has just told the wife character in this album that he wants to sleep with other people, and “Ruminating” is about getting the call of hearing that it has happened. And then he’s going, “If it has to happen, do you want to know? I’m gonna do it more. Do you want me to tell you every time or not?” And she’s far away in a hotel room, not even in her own house. We’ve all been there in that situation where your mind’s just kind of rolling over something again and again. I I was really enjoying using the Korg Triton a lot, because it’s like this plastic-y kind of ‘90s/2000 sound anyway, and it’s got this one drumbeat that I found a couple of days earlier that I just sped the temp up so it felt like this “ruminate and ruminate and ruminate and ruminate and ruminate.” The title wasn’t “Ruminating,” yet, but we knew that’s what it was about, so it was about making those sounds.

The same with “Pussy Palace” as well. Literally before Lily finished even talking about it, it’s just like, “Oh my God…” You’ve opened the door in this place and you’ve seen all this stuff and reality is just flooding into you. Like, who is this? What am I involved in here? So I just was thinking about every bit of blood running from your body. Most of the time there was something like that that came so quickly after her kind of recounting the story effectively. It’s all very literalmusic.

This is visceral, sharp and very low on metaphor — like, we’re just gonna say the exact thing there. But maybe something that is not discussed is, there’s also a lot of like, “Hey, this is sick.” (As in, just musically exciting.) “Relapse” is one of my favorite songs on the record. And it’s very British. That’s totally lyric Lily’s music. It’s also totally my music and is totally Oscar Scheller’s music, who’s another Brit that worked on the records; he kind of led that beat. And as heartbreaking as that song is — because she’s pushed to the edge where she’s like, “Fuck it, can I hold my sobriety against all this? I just want to get numbed out” — there’s another big part of that is also just like: This is a fucking banger. And it’s just that simple.

How quickly or gradually did you share that this record was being made?

We shared it with her manager towards the end of the process. The record was pretty much written by the time we played him everything. And he and I discussed a lot about when to play it to the label, because one of the big questions was, OK, everyone had been generous of their time, although it only took 16 days. So we needed a few more days from this or that person. But by the time we got to the end of the writing and basic production stage, then we were getting into big expenses. There came a point where it was like, well, we’re starting to need some budget now to actually to be able to do things. Then it was a conversation between myself and her manager saying like, “Hey, can we finish this record without sharing it with anyone else? Or do we need to go and play this in the current state in order to get them to back the rest of what needs to happen — getting it mixed, recording Amy Langley’s strings, mastering and all that stuff?” And the decision was made to basically finish the record in its entirety. We finished mixing it on a Sunday, and Lily’s manager went and played the record to BMG the next morning, and that was it.

I haven’t shared it with many people in the last six months. Lily shared it with a lot of close friends, because she needed a bit of that feedback from people. But you’ve got to remember as well that Lily’s had to keep a firm lid on this album just purely from a point of view of how it impacts her life in other ways.

Anything interesting you’re working on at the moment?

I’m almost finished this Latin record for this artist called Yendry that is amazing. It’s completely in Spanish, other than one song that’s in Italian. I don’t understand any of the lyrics. It’s very interesting making a record where I really do not have that sort of lyrical thing to jump off, other than how she explains it to me. It sort of cuts off a sense, but in the same way, then I become so tuned into her vocal performances, understanding where the push-and-pulls are. And I have some very exciting conversations going on since this album came out that I’m sort of like, “Oh my God. Let’s go, man.” I want to hopefully do more with Lily as well.

Any music stars you will be hoping ring you up?

I just want to make loads of really great, great records. I want to make a Madonna record. I was such a fan of that run she was on from “Ray of Light” to “Music” to “Confessions on a Dance Floor,” and I think you can never count her out as dropping a genre-defining record. I would love to make her “Blackstar,” just looking back over her whole life and her career with that self-referencing. I think she’d be quite amazing to do that, if she was in a place to want to do that.

If you approve of artists being self-referential, you must have really been approving when Lily literally says the title of a previous album, “It’s Not Me, It’s You,” as key words in in the final track on this album.

When she did that in the room, saying “it’s not me, it’s you” as the hook… She knows how to spin it for herself, but she also knows how to spin it for everyone else. And I just think she’s like an absolute ninja of knowing how to hit the bullseye. And I think in that moment, there was that question of: Can you self-reference your own album title from years before? Probably only in that song, in that very moment, when you’re trying to bring a close to things.

She’s got more stories to tell. She’s very good at interpreting life and putting it out in these boxes that can really move people. If I hope anything for Lily, I really hope she’s enjoying this right now, seeing the responses. I think she is. I’ve been around her a little bit in the last week, and I hope that now she can feels like she can stand in that as an important career artist that has influenced so many artists, and hasset the bar for a lot of these people, and let them be crude and talk in music as sort of diary entries… and (influenced) especially females to not have to be polite. I hope she can sit here after this record and go, “Wherever I decide to point my focus is OK, and I deserve to be here. I’ve always got the chance to make my best work.” I think that’s beautiful, if someone can get to that place.