• Pharrell Williams told Zane Lowe on the Apple Music interview series that writing “Happy” broke him.
• Williams said writing “Happy” for “Despicable Me 2” came from a sarcastic point of view.
• He said the song’s success made him realize his insignificance in the universe.

Pharrell Williams said “Happy” – one of the biggest hits of the 2010s – “shattered” his worldview.

Williams wrote “Happy” for the soundtrack of 2013’s “Despicable Me 2,” the third-biggest film of the year. Four months after the film’s premiere, he released it as a single along with a 24-hour-long music video.

The song wasn’t an immediate hit in 2013, but was nominated for an Oscar, won a Grammy for Best Music Video, and spent ten weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in 2014.

Billboard marked “Happy” as the best-selling song of 2014 and 21st on the 2010 decade-end charts.

Williams said on Thursday’s episode of Zane Lowe’s Apple Music interview series that writing “Happy,” “Get Lucky” and “Blurred Lines” were pivotal moments in his career because they were all hits that he wrote should.

He said the songs made him realize he wasn’t in control of his success.

“You don’t wake up one morning and decide to make a song about a feeling,” Williams said, referring to “Happy.”

Williams said he wrote nine songs for the scene in “Despicable Me 2” where Gru is on top of the world after a first date, but his ideas were rejected.

“It just took so long before you ran out of ideas and asked yourself a rhetorical question and came back with a sarcastic answer, and that was ‘Happy,'” Williams said. “How do you make a song about a person who is so happy that nothing can bring them down? And I responded sarcastically and put music to it, and that sarcasm became a song, and that broke me.”

Williams said the song’s success opened his eyes to his insignificance in the universe.

“It’s so crazy for us as individuals to think that everything comes from us. Your ideas, everything you get, comes from a library of existence. Nothing is new under the sun,” Williams said, adding that he credits the universe for the success of “Get Lucky” and “Blurred Lines.”

Both singles were among the best-selling songs of 2013, with “Blurred Lines” landing at number two on Billboard’s year-end chart.