Happy Birthday Pharrell!

Allow me to reintroduce myself:

My name is Mercedes.
I love music.
I love Michael Jackson.
I love health and wellness.
And most of all, I love learning and researching.

The purpose of this blog is to capture what is interesting to me at the moment and have this as a living document that I can come back to at any time. I also hope to connect with others by sharing things that I love and that capture my attention.

My interests are pretty disparate and as a way to categorize them, I think it’ll be fun to create some series. My first one, the Michael Jackson University, is still underway; but as I continue to do research on that, naturally 1000 other interest/research topics have popped up and I want to delve into them all!

This specific post will be the first in my new series “My Musical DNA.” In it, I’ll be highlighting my favorite musicians on special days like birthdays, days of remembrance, album/song/concert anniversaries and so on.

First up, Pharrell Williams. To say Pharrell is important to me would be the understatement of a lifetime. Honestly, I can’t really express all the ways Pharrell has inspired me from my musical tastes, to fashion choices, to the type of people I fawn over 😍…. Anyway, Pharrell is a pretty big deal to meeee.

I mean, look at the material!!!!

It’s a common occurrence for me to be bopping along to a song I’ve never heard, look it up, and see that Pharrell produced it/wrote it/had some other creative juice behind it. [Like, a few months ago when I first heard The Weeknd’s and Playboi Carti’s “Timeless” or my experience from like a decade ago with getting introduced to Buddy via “Inspired”].

I vividly remember purchasing the “In My Mind” cd before my family set out on a road trip in 2006, sinking into the backseat, pressing play on my portable cd player, and playing it from top to bottom over and over and over and OVERRRRR again. It is not hyperbole for me to say, it changed my life and is still one of my favorite albums of all time.

I try to cop whatever I can that Pharrell is behind, but Mr. Louis is tres expensive so most of the time I just hit like on IG and send him positive vibrations. I recently had the pleasure of watching his Lego movie and felt beyond inspired to go out and do and be something myself – of course ambivalence and resistance to change stalled that process but we’re back on the horse now!!! (Hopefully! For real this time!!!!)

The point of the story is: Pharrell means a lot to me. His music, his mentality, his swagger, all of it! He is a part of my musical DNA.

Below I’ve shared 10 of my top songs that are either produced by Pharrell, feature Pharrell, or are one of his solo works. I think there are maybe 5 songs, tops, that I don’t like by him so I could literally just post a link to his entire catalog but that doesn’t feel like a creative enough exercise LOL. Sharing as YouTube videos since some of these are sleepers that aren’t on streaming platforms. Enjoy!