Her new album West End Girl was released in October last year, just days after announcing the surprise project, and she admitted she wasn’t thinking about the record, which she wrote and recorded in 10 days following the end of her marriage to David Harbour, in a career or financial sense.
She wasn’t convinced she’d even let anyone hear the album.
Allen told CBS News: “At the time I wasn’t really thinking about it as a commercial endeavour, it was just, it was an act of desperation actually.
“While I was writing it I wasn’t really sure whether it was going to see the light of day up until relatively close to its release. I was always thinking, ‘Is this something I want to share with the world?’ But not when I was writing it because the writing was very much … I hate the word – I don’t hate it but I feel like we hear the words ‘catharsis’ or ‘therapy’ in relation to music [quite a lot].
“It’s an odd idea and an odd question that if you consider yourself an artist that you might think, ‘Should I really be sharing what’s going on in my brain as part of my art?’ That’s kind of messed up, that that is where we have got to as human beings.”
The 40-year-old singer previously insisted West End Girl isn’t a malicious album.
She told Interview magazine: “It’s not a cruel album. I don’t feel like I’m being mean. It was just the feelings I was processing at the time.”
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