On WEST END GIRL, Lily Allen deals with her breakup from David Harbor – but it was never about punishment. More about the process here.
After seven years of musical silence, Lily Allen has returned with a new album. Her LP WEST END GIRL is about her breakup with Stranger Things actor David Harbour. Allen wrote the entire work in ten days – she wanted to capture the raw pain of the end of her marriage. In a new interview, the artist spoke about the creation process, the separation and the consequences.
Editorial recommendations
About vapes and tears: Lily Allen unpacks
On WEST END GIRL it is revealed that Harbor is said to have cheated on her after five years of marriage with a costume designer for the Netflix film “We Have a Ghost” (2023).
In an interview with “Interview”, Lily Allen remembered the recent breakup and said: “At that time I was really trying to process things and that was great for the album.” And further: “I was both vaping and smoking cigarettes at the time, so I had a Parliament Light in one hand and an e-cigarette stick in the other. I cried a lot and told a lot of stories. I was dealing with a long relationship and things came up that I hadn’t really thought about before,” says Allen about the writing process in Los Angeles.
There was initially no concept – just 18 songs without music or developed lyrics. “Nobody in the studio knew what was going on in my life. I got there, cried like crazy for about two hours and said, ‘We’re going to write an album based on these feelings.'”
For the 40-year-old Brit, the beauty of WEST END GIRL lies in this pain: “It’s like a kind of instinctive reliving of the events.” According to Allen, heartbreak can also be a gift – it forces you to deal intensively with yourself.
Lily Allen on the power of breakups
According to the interview, she is doing better today. Contrary to public perception, WEST END GIRL is not a revenge album. “I’m neither confused nor angry today,” she explains. The work reads like a story with a beginning, climax and end.
The separation from David Harbor was a turning point in order to develop creatively again. “I was probably subconsciously aware that something was wrong in my personal life and I couldn’t deal with it creatively because it would have led to failure. So everything had to fall apart for me to find my authentic voice,” she says.
When asked how to get over heartbreak, Allen replies, “I think it’s just about getting out there and socializing.” She admits that in previous relationships – including her marriage to Harbor – she tended to focus entirely on her partner and had to learn to rely on her friends.
WEST END GIRL: Your most honest work?
For what is now her fifth studio album, she worked with Blue May, Seb Chew and Kito. In interviews she described the record as follows: “The album is vulnerable in a way that my music has perhaps never been before – at least not in the context of a whole album.”