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I Saw the word ‘vasectomy’ and was like, ‘This must be crazy,'” recalls the 33-year-old songstress. chloe angelidesCo-writer of many songs lily allenThe provocative divorce album of west end girlThe British pop singer brought her diary entries to the studio for inspiration and continued writing notes, ,[Producer] Blue May started playing the most heartbreaking guitar chords and I was taking the words she was writing and making them rhyme. The result was “Just Enough”, a painfully vulnerable ballad written by Allen and his team in an hour. “I don’t know anyone else in this [pop music] Talking openly about feeling aging and hoping to be rejuvenated and talking about vasectomy,” says Angelides of Allen.
For music lovers and the general public, Allen’s creation west end girl Has been a source of both mystery and envy. Of course, there’s an ambiguous undercurrent to all this: This is a messy album about two very public figures, one that invites listeners to guess what’s true and what’s an exercise in artistic license. This record was apparently made in just 10 days. The photos, videos, and captions shared by the team make the process both fun and intense; Allen is writing the song titles from a cave-like apartment with lights and palm trees outside; Everyone dressed in sleek leather and black, lounging in front of recording equipment during the day, dancing or drinking while sitting on mid-century furniture at night.
This behind-the-scenes material lifts the curtain on the work of songwriters. Most people rarely think about them, except perhaps to criticize an over-produced pop song or to marvel at stories of creative sparks: think of Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”, which arose from Paul Epworth banging on a broken drum, or Max Martin’s misunderstanding of American slang, which led to the slightly confused but instantly iconic “Hit Me Baby One More Time”.
Allen’s album is extremely unique, based on a very specific situation of his. It feels like we’ve grown up with her and now we’re hearing a new, painful chapter in her story. But when it came to conveying his innermost feelings to the audience, he had help. So what’s it like to be the songwriter on such a very emotional, very personal project? west end girlDo songwriters have to give more or less of themselves in situations where songs are offered to anyone for purchase, compared to writing “for a pitch”,
For Angelides, although the making of the album is fresh in recent memory, it is difficult to explain exactly how it came to be. “With Lily, I feel like we blinked and we passed out and we had an album.” Before writing it, the team spent a day talking about Alan’s story, which was important for the writing. “She was the most straightforward, honest, open person and that didn’t leave room for any confusion or questions,” she says. Every day he asked her how she was feeling and which idea she wanted to focus on from the list she had made. With the exception of a few songs, most of what they wrote together was included on the album, which is a rare possibility. Several vocals were sung in one take, without re-recording.
The “Pussy Palace” is imprinted in the minds of Angelides as an attraction. Blue May was playing a synth chord progression that made her feel “nervous” – he wrote over it. “By the end of it, Blue bought a light machine that shone bright lights on the wall, and bought a fog machine. The room was filled with fog and colored lights and we were blowing ‘Pussy Palace’ 50 times in a row,” she recalls. That night she drove across LA and back home, knowing the song was special, but wondering about the reception it would get. “I just helped a great artist write a song called ‘Pussy Palace.’ Will it do well or will people say, ‘How dare you contribute something like that?'”
![Songwriter Chloe Angelides: “Once I finished writing [artists]I just want to go home and be me.](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/stsp/to_webp,q_lossy,ret_img/https://www.thelocalreport.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/IMG_7714.jpg)
A songwriter on such an intimate project isn’t just a writer: They’re a therapist, a sounding board, a friend, a philosopher, a medium for your vision. Entering someone else’s world, processing your feelings with them, requires self-care. “It’s the way I shower,” says Angelides. “I’ll take a shower when I get home to mentally wash up.”
It is rare that songwriters will own rights to the material they help write. Most do not have any projects or releases under their name. Angelides does this, but like most songwriters, she prefers to stay behind the scenes. “I’m 33 and maybe I’ll change but I’m who I am Hatred Being on stage and having the focus be on me,” she admits. For him, writing songs is the greatest high, as is the songwriter’s lifestyle of writing and touring with musicians: ”Once I finish writing with them, the artist has to tour it, they have to shoot the video. I just want to go home and be me.
Nina Nesbitt, a chart-topping Scottish artist who also writes for artists including Perrie Edwards and Jessie Ware, says she feels enthusiasm rather than jealousy for the artists she writes for – although it depends on what kind of songwriting she’s doing. It’s one thing to co-write directly with an artist; It’s another thing to write “for the pitch.” She admits that she sometimes feels protective of her creations: “Honestly, it’s like someone is trying to steal your baby,” she laughs.
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On one occasion, she fell in love with a song she co-wrote that was shelved for Rihanna. She recalls, “Obviously I would never stand in the way of Rihanna’s cut – we all have the same percentage here, people have to pay their bills and feed their kids.” “As much as I liked it, I would like Rihanna to sing it.” However, when the song did not materialise, there was talk of giving it to other artists. “I was feeling very depressed at the thought of not being able to figure it out myself.” Eventually he convinced the team to let him keep it, and his instincts proved correct: “Is It Really Me You’re Missing” became one of his biggest hits, released under his own name.
Being an artist in her own right allows Nesbitt to help other artists create their own music without any ego, she says. When working with them on something particularly sensitive, she often asks: “Do you personally, really, want to release this as a song, or is it just something you want to get off your chest?” From there, she facilitates and moves on: She writes down the words or phrases the artist is sharing in a notebook, hums tunes and says vague lyrics, until she captures the feeling they’re describing and can build a song around it. She adds, “Whatever happens in the room stays in the room, so it’s a really safe space.”
Nesbitt says that professional songwriters have a sixth sense for recognizing what’s in a song when they hear it, even in the country in which it was written. “I can hear there are four writers on a song, I can hear their conversations about cutting the pre-chorus in half or the chorus needing to go on this note,” she says, citing Katy Perry’s “Never Really Over” as an example of a pop masterpiece, a mathematical equation that is certainly “very well written.” The product of many minds. After our conversation, I saw this: A total of nine songwriters are credited for “Never Really Over,” including Norwegian singer Dagny, whose 2017 track “Love You Like That” was a big inspiration for Perry’s hit.
Nesbitt says, “Then I can still hear it when there’s just one or maybe two writers. It feels very unedited, like a stream of consciousness.” He argues that no type of song is better than the other, they are just different mediums. in a way that you can appreciate Fleabag Or girls Being the slightly deranged product of a single star and inheritance Or its thickness As in a group tennis match between intellectuals, you realize that they are all equally impressive for different reasons, not even remotely attempting the same thing.
And yet, both Angelides and Nesbitt describe a kind of collective flow state – one that can emerge between an artist and a group of collaborators – allowing everyone to move toward a shared vision that unfolds simultaneously for all involved. This is how multiple writers can connect with one artist and create something so intimate, painful, and funny. west end girlLooks, if anything, even more like Lily Allen’s than if she’d written it alone.
That’s why, when it comes to splitting up songs, who gets paid what percentage or even who wrote it can be incredibly complicated. In a paper titled “Working Out the Split: Creative Collaboration and the Assignment of Copyright Across Differing Musical Worlds”, Dr. Philip McIntyre and Justin Morey write: “The combinations of collaboration seem limitless. Often, most writers are not concerned with who does what or how it is that the song is created. Certainly there is no time to work out ‘splits’ or financial remuneration for the work involved. Then A number of complex financial, legal, ethical, cultural, ideological, discursive and, dare we say, mythological factors will likely complicate this. As Nesbitt puts it, “I wonder if I’ll be hearing ChatGPIT any time soon.”
Once the music is created, most songwriting careers involve waiting for someone to buy your songs, and for the sting of rejection to wear off. Angelides has “thousands and thousands of songs that could find a home at any moment”, either in discussion or held in the bank for his publishers. “One of my songs with Carly Rae Jepsen came out eight years after I’d written it,” she says. “When they sent the email about the songwriting split, I forgot which song they meant because it was so old. But it came up. So even if it’s not a ‘no’ at first, songs can eventually find a home.”
Perhaps the most important skill for a working songwriter is learning to give up control, whether that’s control over how the song is created, who sings it, how it is distributed, or what it becomes once it’s released. That final surrender has been almost psychedelic for the Angelids when it comes to west end girlDuring the writing process he played an album constantly in his car that went viral: it was remembered, it was obsessed with, and it was suddenly everywhere,
At Thanksgiving, while eating dinner and playing board games with my large family, “Pussy Palace” was playing quietly in the background. She felt herself approaching the music differently, heard the production afresh and realized that it could function as atmosphere. “I try to let whatever I’m making come out as it is,” she says. “Like, ‘Pussy Palace’ is playing when my grandma is next to me and she has no idea what we’re saying in the song, but it’s just a good tune. It’s so much fun for me.”