To get you up to speed, the two married in 2020 but confirmed that they had split in February of this year. While Lily did not publicly comment on their breakup at the time, she did make it clear that she was struggling with her mental health.
In January, she took a break from her podcast, Miss Me?, after telling listeners: “I’m just really not in a good place. I know I’ve been talking about it for months, but I’ve been spiraling and spiraling and spiraling, and it’s got out of control.”
“I can’t concentrate on anything except the pain that I’m going through, and it’s really, really hard,” she added, also revealing that she’d had a panic attack during the podcast team’s Christmas party a month earlier.
And speaking to Perfect magazine ahead of the album’s release last month, Lily shared: “It was hard to make this record. It was incredibly manic, and it was emotionally traumatic.” She went on to explain that the record was her way “of processing things” she was going through in her “private life.”
So, when West End Girl told the story of Lily being left heartbroken by a partner who forced her into an open relationship, fans were gagged — to say the least. While Lily never mentions David by name, and has reportedly been “prevented from discussing specifically” the “details about the demise of her recent marriage,” listeners didn’t struggle when it came to putting two and two together.
On the album, Lily recalls how her partner asked her to open up their marriage after he was seemingly left resentful of her landing an acting role in London in the summer of 2021. Despite Lily reluctantly agreeing that he could sleep with other women as long as they were strangers who he only ever saw for sex, she was devastated to find out that he ended up having fully-fledged affairs behind her back.
The song “Pussy Palace” is particularly eyebrow-raising as it chronicles Lily discovering that her partner was secretly using their West Village apartment as his sex palace. She sings: “I found a shoebox full of handwritten letters / From brokenhearted women wishing you could have been better / Sheets pulled off the bed / Strewn on all on the floor / Long black hair probably from the night before / Duane Reade bag with the handles tied / Sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside / Hundreds of Trojans, you’re so fucking broken / How’d I get caught up in your double life?”
You can read a full breakdown of the album’s jaw-dropping revelations here, but other key aspects include Lily’s partner blaming her for his own infidelity and showing no empathy or concern for how he made her feel as she battles with her sense of self-worth.
Needless to say, by the time that the final song had finished playing, many listeners felt ready to go to war for Lily, with West End Girl quickly becoming a viral talking point on social media.
And now, Lily has admitted that the passionate response fans have had to her revelations has helped to validate the pain she was feeling at the time. Speaking on CBS Mornings, Lily also clarified that she’d had the studio time already booked for November 2024 before her marriage fell apart, and that she wrote the songs without knowing if she’d ever actually share them with the world.
“At the time, I wasn’t really even thinking about it as a commercial endeavor,” Lily explained. “It was an act of desperation, actually. While I was writing it, I wasn’t really sure 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?’”
She went on to admit that subsequently sitting on the album for 10 months was “a nightmare,” sharing: “I think it’s sort of stunted my healing process somewhat, and actually, since I’ve put it out, it’s felt completely and utterly liberating. It was kind of hellish having it in the background.”
Thankfully, releasing the album was undeniably the best possible move, with Lily’s career flourishing off the back of it. The British singer confessed that she was “overwhelmed and massively grateful” for the response, and when quizzed on how she felt about what people were saying about the album, she said it was “affirming.”
“I mean, it’s amazing,” she began. “I write music for myself and to make myself feel more normal. And when something connects with people, it’s affirming, right? It’s validating… And the things that I was experiencing in my life at the time, I wasn’t really getting that validation for whatever reason.”
“So, to now have people listen to this record and to go: ‘Yeah, that’s really messed up, that’s really painful, I can’t imagine what it would be like to go through something like that’ is like: ‘OK, now I know why I had to drag myself into a treatment center!'” she added.
Elsewhere in the interview, Lily said that she made the decision to go to a treatment center on her own, recalling: “Just to focus on my brain because I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t eating, I was really not in a good way.”
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