Breaking into Billboard’s Top 10 ain’t easy. Just ask Ellie Goulding, whose single “Lights” floated around for more than a year before miraculously landing at No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100.
“I still don’t think any of us really believe it,” Goulding tells The Post. “I feel like I’ve talked about it so many times that now I’m a bit confused. I’ve confused myself.”
Inspired by the British chanteuse’s fear of the dark, “Lights” first appeared as the title track of Goulding’s 2010 debut album in the UK. The song eventually became her sixth UK single, grabbing the attention of American music bloggers looking for the Next Big British Thing. As the buzz continued to build in England, Goulding finally issued the album here in March 2011, where the song gained airplay even without an official release as a single.
That spring should have been her time. On April 29, she performed at the wedding reception for a certain duke and duchess of Cambridge. A week later, she showed off her chops on “Saturday Night Live.”
“I thought doing [‘SNL’] would be like, OK, if this doesn’t make ‘Lights’ big, nothing will,” she says. “But you know, it just shows you anything can happen. I hate saying that because that’s the name of my new song. But it’s true.”
“Lights” didn’t shoot up the charts like many songs do after widely televised performances — it slowly crawled its way to the top, not peaking until more than a year later this August. That climb marked the longest ascent to the Top 10 ever for a female that wasn’t a country crossover to pop.
“I can’t explain it. I could easily say it’s because the lyrics are more relatable, blah, blah, blah,” she says. “But I honestly can’t think of a single reason. I know that there are songs that do well there and not here [in the UK], and vice versa. But I don’t know. I assumed because of it not doing massively well here in terms of charts, it would be the same for the States.”
Silvio Pietroluongo, director of charts at Billboard, can’t explain the phenomenon either.
“Sometimes these things take a while,” he says. “The slow trajectory was the odd thing. It was just progression, progression, progression and a steady build.”
For what it’s worth, Goulding, who dates dubstep master Skrillex, is more than ready to move on.
“When I say that I’m confused, it’s because I’ve said the same thing about ‘Lights’ over and over again,” she says. “It’s been the topic of every single interview I’ve done in the last, God knows, months. So now I just get confused when I try to explain it.”
Goulding may finally be able to change the conversation. Her sophomore album, “Halcyon,” bows Tuesday, featuring her aforementioned new single “Anything Could Happen.”
“The experiences I’ve had and the things I’ve done have been priceless for making this record. Because [for] ‘Lights,’ I was young and I was naïve, and I made it in a bedroom. And I wasn’t ever sure if it was going to be a record,” she says. “But this was a very focused, very committed project. So I think that that probably shows.”
One can only hope it doesn’t take as long to materialize on the charts.