Dua Lipa brought some much-needed fun to 2020 with her Club Future Nostalgia remix album, which featured night out-ready twists on her original Future Nostalgia tracks — including a verse from Gwen Stefani on Mark Ronson’s “Physical” remix.
In a wide-ranging interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music on Tuesday (Feb. 23), Lipa recalled the pinch-me moment when Stefani agreed to sing on the track. “Honestly, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it,” she gushed. “I sat by my phone and I was literally holding my face pretty much. I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy. This is crazy.’ I was just pacing around the room. Yeah, like, ‘I’ve got it!'”
“And the way it happened was so cool because we basically contacted Gwen and her team to try and clear the sample for ‘Hollaback Girl,’ for Club Future Nostalgia,” she remembered. “And I was like, ‘Maybe we should just ask, put a feeler out, see if she wants to do something.’ And she loved Mark Ronson’s remix of ‘Physical.’ And she was like, ‘I’d love to jump on this.’ I’m like, ‘Hell yeah, let’s go. This is surreal.’ It was just so exciting. It was such an exciting period, especially because it was that period of lockdown and the whole project came together because of everyone being at home. But it just made lockdown so exciting. I was just dancing around the house, listening to songs that I guess I’ve known for so long, that felt so new. So I was really just rediscovering the music in itself in a different way.”
Lipa went on to thank The Blessed Madonna, “because I really couldn’t have done it without her. She was the orchestrator behind that. It was incredible to be able to work alongside her and learn from her, and she’s amazing.”
Reflecting on her Grammy-nominated sophomore album a year later, Lipa explained that “there was, in some sense with some lyrics, there was this false sense of confidence.”
“There were songs that I wrote because I wanted to feel a certain type of way, or there were songs that I put certain lyrics or certain feelings in that I was like, ‘I want to be able to listen to this song and feel that way, that necessarily I wasn’t always feeling,” she continued. “Or when I was creating this record, I wanted it to set it as a form of escapism. And I don’t know, it felt like during this time it did serve as a form of escapism for me. And I was so happy with the response that the record got and that, people were like, ‘This got me through lockdown and I did so many workouts at home.'”
Listen to the full interview via Apple Music below.
