Rita Ora has spoken of how her marriage to Taika Waititi “changed her forever”, and that her husband inspired her to write music again.
The Kosovo-born singer has been teasing her third studio album since 2019. After releasing launch single ‘You Only Love Me’ in January, she announced new album ‘You & I’ and revealed the new track ‘Praising You‘ featuring Fatboy Slim earlier this week.
In a new interview with Billboard, Ora said she had a “low” period in her musical career where she had “lost a lot of confidence and a lot of hope”. She had spent so much time “fighting to be heard” that she hit a breaking point.
“I guess when you’re at your lowest point, you can make a choice,” she explained. “You either kind of get back up and keep going, or you just let it consume you. And I did that. I got up. I flew to Australia to do The Voice over there, and I met somebody who changed me forever.”
Rita Ora then spoke about how meeting actor and writer Taika Waititi, her now husband who she married in 2022, had “changed her forever” and helped her get back to making music.
“I definitely never felt that [love] before,” she said, “and so I just wrote it all down and I thought, ‘OK, I think it’s time to make some music again.’ And here we are.”
The What We Do in the Shadows and Jojo Rabbit filmmaker Waititi previously featured in the voice memo that opened recent single ‘You Only Love Me’.
In a statement about her new music, Ora previously said that ‘You & I’ “means a lot to her”. “It’s like my diary of the last few years, it’s my sound and it just feels so true to me and who I am today,” she added.
‘You & I’ is set to be released on July 14 via BMG.
In other news, Rita Ora is set to perform at the new Munich festival SUPERBLOOM alongside Megan Thee Stallion, Sigrid, and Years & Years.
Calvin Harris recent denied producing an unreleased Ora album that never saw the light of day, saying that he and the singer just worked on one unreleased song together that “wasn’t good.”