Rita Ora caught up with Billboard via video chat from her home in the U.K., where she is quarantined with her family, to discuss what she’s been up to while being home, her latest single “How to Be Lonely,” and what fans can expect from her third studio album, which she says is one of the most exciting things she has ever been a part of.
Chatting with Billboard’s senior director of music Jason Lipshutz, Ora says she has been trying to find the silver lining in the current situation, adding that being forced to stay at home during the pandemic has given her the opportunity to go back and fix things in her music.
“It’s actually really refreshing,” she says. “There's not a lot of people around and so you can go back into your laptop and look at some old ideas and try and sort of finish things off that you would never really have time to do. I have a lot of friends that are in the same boat that are sort of sending over ideas, and we're just kind of bouncing things off one another.”
Aside from working on music, Ora notes that she has been keeping busy working out, painting, cooking, reading and video chatting with her family and friends abroad, while also staying in contact with her team.
In the interview, Ora also speaks about her new Lewis Capaldi-penned single “How to Be Lonely,” noting that as soon as she heard it, she thought it was a “really cool perception of what people think a breakup song is.
“It's a good angle and I just don't feel like a lot of people talk about actually being alone,” she says. “I just wanted to put a spin on it and say that it's OK… to be alone, or at one with yourself…It's definitely a breakup song, but from a different perspective.”
Speaking of the song’s music video, directed by Dave Meyers, Ora recalls filming it in LA in January, right around the time she got her tonsils removed. As for what fans can expect from her forthcoming third studio album, Ora reveals that she might not include “How to Be Lonely” on the record, since she wanted it to be a solo single, but that her new album has been “one of the most exciting things [she’s] ever been a part of."
“I'm turning it 360,” she says. “It's music like I've never done. I'm introducing live instrumentation and I'm really experimenting with other artists from completely different genres that I wouldn't usually work with and just seeing what happens. It's just a big old experiment and I think that might be what this album is, just a cool experiment. It's just really fun. It's full of life and it's all the artists that I really actually just like right now, so we'll see how that goes.”
You can check out the full interview with Rita Ora above.