Lea Michele Said...

I could go with him to anywhere in the world and be happy, whether it was a deserted island or a palace somewhere or a tiny apartment—I could get in the car and drive away with him to anywhere and be so happy.

“I mean, I slept at his house the night before. We had a sleepover, him and his girlfriend and I crashed at their house,” she said. “I mean, I love them. He’s like my brother. When we sing together, we’re sort of reminded of that musical connection that we have, and we work incredibly well together. Darren and I, we performed so many times together on Glee, and we really, like I said, we work incredibly well together. We wanted to put those songs out for our fans and maybe, hopefully, in the future do something on a larger scale together.”

Duh! He’s heard everything. He loves the album. I think he really loves “Anything’s Possible.” We were having a bunch of sleepovers, and he stayed with me in L.A. for a little while, and I just love him so much. I love having him with me. He’s my best friend in the whole world, and he supports me so much. I just think people get soulmates in their life and he’s my soulmate.

I wasn’t originally thinking of including [Hey You] on the album. It’s sort of a sensitive subject for me that’s hard to talk about, and I didn’t want anything on the record that I couldn’t talk about. But it just felt so beautiful. It wasn’t about loss, it wasn’t about sadness. It was really about joy and love. I love it so much, and I really feel it represents who I am and everything that I’ve been through in my life. I don’t talk much more beyond that. When you come to my concert, that’s really when I open up and dive into what these songs personally mean to me. At the end of the day, the song is pretty specific, and people are gonna make of it what they want, but I wanted to make a song about loss that wasn’t necessarily sad. I wanted to show this beautiful moment and there’s a little bit more of a deeper story that goes with it that I talk about in my concert.

Take me back to the times where you would have to write love letters that would take weeks to be delivered and you’d read them over and over and over again. That real, true romance, I don’t want to believe that that’s going to ever go away.

Here’s the thing: When you come off of a [cultural] phenomenon type of a television show or movie or whatever you’re involved in that could be at the level of a “Glee” or a “Harry Potter” or “Twilight” — when you are a part of something that just makes such a huge impact in entertainment but also in the world — you know, we had more hit singles than like Elvis, The Beatles, and Michael Jackson put together, and I think we met Oprah and the President in one day. And so there’s a lot of incredible things that come when you are finished with a project like that, but there also come a lot of challenges. For me, I’ve been so grateful to continue to work afterwards, and have the support of my great fanbase, so for me, I want to just continue to let people know where I’m at and how grateful I am to be where I am right now. I will 100 percent hold onto “Glee” and everything that it brought into my life, and that’s why I include the “Glee” songs in my concert because I’m so proud of it and I’m so grateful for it. And this is definitely a new chapter for me. I’m 30 years old. This album [“Places”] has a lot of maturity to it, and that’s okay with me. It also has its fun light happy elements, but it’s really about these past couple of years in my life and where I’m at today.

I feel so passionate about these songs and this entire album. With my last album, which I’m so proud of, at the end of the day it was during such an intense time of my life — obviously personally, but also professionally with “Glee” — and it was hard promoting that album for both of those reasons. A lot of the songs were extremely personal, and I also just didn’t have the time. So now, being at a different place in my life — personally, but also having the free mental space not being on a singing and dancing television show at the exact same time — I have the energy and the excitement of where I’m at in my life right now to talk about all of these songs and what they mean to me and how they connect to my life and how personal they are. And being that I couldn’t really do that with the last album, I’m just like busting right now being able to do that with this album and with these songs.

Because, for me, it was important that it was just me and my voice. I love doing duets, it’s a lot of fun, but it was more important to show everyone that I was doing this on my own. I couldn’t have anything distracting from that. It was a very natural decision.

I overly care about people when I love them, and I take care of them probably more than I should. Whereas when you listen to the song, you sort of think it’s like, ‘I’ll run to you; you’re gonna take care of me’, but it’s really about taking care of someone else, and that’s sort of how I love people. All I want to do is let people in and take care of them - that’s why I love this song.

I’m so excited for this series! I really hope that it achieves the success and recognition that it deserves. It’s a show that’s important and easy-going, and that reminds me a bit of Glee in that it was amazing and had good music, just like this project! But at the end of the day, the show sends a very important message and that’s a priority that I have when it comes to choosing a new project. [Valentina, my character] is very intelligent and determined! She’s a bit like Rachel [Berry], but instead of being passionate about musical theater, she’s obsessed with politics!

Everyone goes through stuff, and you just have to have faith in life. It’s so hard sometimes […]; I try really hard to not lose it. And when you find that you can believe again, there’s such a strength that comes with that. So Anything’s Possible, for me, it really just says everything that I sometimes can’t say myself about what it’s like to just go through it and then come out the other side and believe and have faith again and decide to leave everything in the past and not be conformed to what you’ve been through or not be held in that box of that just being who you are for the rest of your life. So thank you Mozella for giving me this song; it has helped me so much and I really hope it helps people the way that it helped me.

Love Is Alive is the first track on the album. […] I think that this song is so important to me because I really feel like it encapsulates the entire vibe of what this record is. It’s a vocal album, and that song, it mirrors the songs that I grew up listening to, like those four-minute-Celine Dion-epic vocal journey songs. […] There’s no beginning, middle and end; it’s just like a whole, long, beautiful vocal journey. Obviously, when you listen to the words, when you hear “love is alive,” it’s such a beautiful, powerful theme, but at the end of the day, even if there were no words to this song and you just heard it, you’d be equally as moved. I really do see the beauty and joy and love in life again and I’m the most grateful for that […], to feel the way that I do, to believe in love again and to have love in my life. So that’s what this song means to me.

I am obsessed with [Ellie Goulding] and she was in the process of making her last record. This song I guess didn’t make the mix and they thought it would be a good fit for me. It was really important to me that I wrote most of these songs, or that these songs were personal to me, so we didn’t take a lot—they came from personal stories of mine. But, when we heard this song, we were like, ‘It’s so perfect for the record.’ It sounds like Ellie, but I feel like I’ve made it my own and I’m a huge fan of hers, so I can’t wait for everybody to hear it.