Pharrell Williams Opens Up About Working With Rihanna on 'R9'

Fans are desperate for Rihanna‘s ninth studio album, and Pharrell Williams is opening up about the process of working together.

The 47-year-old “Happy” superstar got candid with Rick Rubin as part of the Broken Record Podcast.

PHOTOS: Check out the latest pics of Rihanna

“It’s been a minute. Oh yeah, it’s really her at the end of the day, what she wants…sound-wise, I was trying to just make something that looks and feels like she does,” he explained of working with Rihanna on the upcoming record.

“She talks about what she wants to feel and then it’s my job to reverse engineer that…it’s the feeling first,” he went on to say.

“We’re reverse engineering that feeling and trying to turn that into something. You just kind of dive in and go for it…that doesn’t really take too long to crack. You have coordinates, you know where you’re going, you know what you’re looking for, you’ll know when you’re there.”

“We got the right writers for the right kind of tone and myself, so we kind of like just really wrestle and grapple until we feel like we’re really hitting that specific note.”

He also discussed whether the lyrics or melody come first: “It’s the melody, and then we listen to what the melody is saying…if some words do come out, in the places where there are no words, you kind of take the emotion of what you’re trying to communicate and you find the words and you do a mosaic.”

At the same time, Rihanna‘s been making headlines for a reported new romance.