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It took 396 days for Cynthia Erivo to complete her newest album, I Forgive You.
The 20-track LP is a vulnerable revelation, where she conveys confidence, reflects on pain, and embodies every aspect of Cynthia — the woman, friend, lover, actress, and vocalist— fully. She created such a masterpiece while also taking on the role of a lifetime: Elphaba in Jon M. Chu’s cinematic depiction of Wicked. Unpacking the story behind such a revered duality proved just how high she regards the sanctity of her work, both on-screen and in the studio.
Having been inspired by the hard truth of life and the power of forgiveness, the Grammy-Tony-Emmy winner wants to allow listeners “the chance to open up a conversation about things that they’ve been through that they haven’t necessarily let go of.”
She explained, “I wanted to make an album that gave me the chance to say ‘I forgive me’ and ‘I forgive others for hurt that I’ve received’ and ‘I want to be forgiven for the hurt that I’ve caused others.’ I also liked the idea that people had to say, “I forgive you,” every time they talked about this album. I think it’s three words that we’re not necessarily good at saying.”
She joked about being a “glutton for punishment” for carrying the emotional weight of Elphaba while diving so deep into herself to create I Forgive You. However, she knew the time for the album was now.
“I don’t know where the energy came from to do this, but I feel like because I was in a really creative state […] I feel like the space opened up for me to create musically, and I’ve felt the itch for a while, and I sort of had been pushing it away, and finally I just succumbed to it,” Cynthia gushed.
Whether she was singing about the “healthiest goodbye” on “Grace,” giving a different meaning to the color blue on “She Said,” weeping after recording “Brick By Brick,” tossing out a list of words to piece together a theme, or then channeling a different emotional weight on “Defying Gravity,” Cynthia ensured she was present in each moment. She had to be.
“It was very easy to differentiate the two musical spaces because [the album] was me and [‘Defying Gravity’] was Elphaba,” she noted. Yet, she admitted what she learned from playing such layered, complex characters and connected the dots from Celie’s “I’m Here,” Elphaba’s “Defying Gravity,” and Cynthia’s I Forgive You.
She shared, “There are definitely parts of myself that these characters bring out. I think it’s hard not to. With Celie, I think there’s a really interesting thing about beauty that I found really hard to deal with […] I had to sort of reckon with how I felt about myself, how I felt about how I looked, and how I felt about how other people saw me really closely. I’m really proud of being able to move through that and work through that and know that actually the beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
“With Elphaba, I had to reckon with some of the loneliness that I had felt. I’ve never really felt the same as anyone; I’ve always felt very odd. So you come face to face with, ‘Oh, this person doesn’t fit and you don’t fit,’ and now you’re facing it every single day. You are on set, and you are green, and nobody else is green. You can’t help but [feel] the loneliness of it all,” she continued.
In tackling that while creating her album, Cynthia admitted that she couldn’t “properly decompress” until it was over.
She explained, “There’s something really beautiful about writing your feelings and putting melody to them and putting a sound to the experience that you’ve had that actually is really helpful for decompressing and letting those things go. Letting Elphaba and [‘Wicked‘] go was a really physical thing because once you took off the green, the green was gone. But when you step into the studio, it’s all left on the recording.”
In our lengthy conversation, the British songbird also opened up about why she isn’t rushing to perform “Defying Gravity” in concert, why “I Choose Love” and “Holy Refrain” are the songs that best define who she is today, and what she hopes fans will take away from I Forgive You.
Check out the full interview above.
