In an interview, Pharrell recently shared a little-known fact about his song ‘Happy’: that it was meant to be a sarcastic track.

Pharrell said, “When I was about 40, that’s when ‘Get Lucky,’ ‘Blurred Lines,’ ‘Happy,’ all that was the same year. So I was like okay, whoa. And these were all songs that were more commissions instead of, I just woke up one day and decided I’m gonna write about xyz.”

He also revealed that he sent in multiple songs trying to bring that joyful tone of Despicable Me 2, and each of these songs was rejected. He continued, “[I] asked myself a rhetorical question and came back with a sarcastic answer, and that’s what ‘Happy’ was.”

He added, “[The question was,] ‘How do you make a song about a person that’s so happy that nothing can bring them down?’ And I sarcastically answered it and put music to it, and that sarcasm became the song. And that broke me that all of what I thought it was supposed to be didn’t do that, and I had to learn that the universe is a part of everything we do. It’s so crazy.”