For her next album, Dua Lipa pursued perfection. And, as history tells us, perfection takes time and hard graft.
The British and Albanian star opened the 2024 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles with a performance of “Training Season” and “Houdini,” the first singles from her forthcoming third album.
Lipa stayed on in L.A., and stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Live on Thursday night (Feb. 8) for a chat about her writing process.
“Training Season” and “Houdini,” we learned, made the cut from almost 100 songs penned for the project, each of which lives in precious book which Lipa showed to Kimmel.
“It’s got every single song I wrote for this album,” she says of the book. ”I wrote 97 songs.” Are any of them terrible? “Lots,” she admits. “About 80 of them.”
“Training Season” and “Houdini” aren’t among them.
Since the 2020 release of her hit sophomore album, Future Nostalgia, which peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, Lipa has grown in confidence.
“The second I write a song, I know its good or not or whether its close,” she tells Kimmel. “Every song on this album unlike any of the other records I’ve made, I’ve gone in and I’ve re-written it over and over again, until I felt like it was perfect, which I didn’t really have the confidence to do on my previous records.”
Earlier in her career, she continues, whatever was written on the day “was pretty much what everyone heard.”
This time, “I’m much more confident in myself as a songwriter and as a performer and how I want things to be and sound and look.” On the new collection, she “went in, digged a little deeper, and I changed things to the point that it felt perfect to me. And I feel proud of it.”
During her appearance as Kimmel’s guest, Lipa talked fangirling Katy Perry, tested some Albanian expressions with the host, and explained how she has meticulously kept notes since she “was tiny,” collecting on paper her “ideas, plans and dreams.”
What she didn’t discuss was the album title, its tracklist or release date. “Because I want to keep it a secret for a little bit longer,” she says. “I can’t reveal my secrets.”
The forthcoming LP is the followup to Future Nostalgia, which logged four weeks at No. 1 on the Official U.K. Albums Chart, won best pop vocal album at the 2021 Grammy Awards, and featured “Levitating,” the No. 1 hit on Billboard’s 2021 year-end Hot 100 Songs chart.
Watch the late-night interview below.
