The Pharrell Factory

Pharrell williams and crew throw it back to the days full of boiler suits and popping—or pop art—colorways. Rob haskell sits down with the impresario of cool.

The truth will set you free,” a voice warns, “but first it will piss you off.” This might not sound like the opening salvo of a world-conquering Pharrell Williams record. But every era demands music that expresses its urgencies, and for Pharrell, who as a performer or producer has reeled off dizzying numbers of hits, this isn’t the time for infectious hooks.

He is not a politician. He avoids the soapbox. Love is still the message. “The only gun I shoot is love,” he tells me, giving that message its due context, on a cool autumn evening in Hollywood in the midst of the production push on albums for Justin Timberlake and Ariana Grande. Indeed, the 44-year-old singer–producer– fashion designer–philanthropist could recline deeply into a nirvana of nearly universal admiration—something like that blissed-out place imagined in “Happy,” his irresistible hit from 2013. But from today’s vantage point, “Happy” has an almost prelapsarian naïveté, and since then storm clouds have been massing in the genius’s brain. The new track he’s played me, called “Lemon,” comes from his forthcoming album with N.E.R.D, the funk-rock trio Pharrell cofounded nearly 20 years ago and to which he has returned periodically, mining the sound and the fury of his rough beginnings in the projects of Virginia Beach. (Pharrell’s childhood in those projects will also be the subject of Atlantis, his forthcoming movie musical.)