"I loved him very much": Pink reveals heartbreaking inspiration behind hit track
Multi award winning singer-songwriter Pink has opened up about the heartache that inspired her 2006 hit song ‘Who Knew’.
The 43-year-old was chatting to fellow singer Kelly Clarkson on Kelly’s talk show when she made the tragic admission that ‘Who Knew’ is about the loss of two of her friends to drug overdose.
“I lost several friends, unfortunately, to overdose,” she told Kelly, “and the second one was very, very, very close to me, and I loved him very much.”
The singer was referring to her dear friend Sekou Harris, who died of a heroin overdose at just 14 years old.
In a 2012 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Pink said of the song and its inspiration, “I always wanted to write a song for a friend of mine, Sekou Harris, who overdosed on heroin and died. And I never knew how because I didn’t want to force it and write some cheesy overdose song.”
When Kelly mentioned that experiencing so much loss “sucks”, Pink countered that loss is unavoidable and that people “need music for that”.
“I need music to help me through my feelings,” she said, “and I can numb down really easy.”
She opened up about how the song has evolved over the years, and provided her comfort when faced with the deaths of those close to her heart.
"But the thing that I love about the song now, after all these years, is that I never get tired of performing it, and it's taken on so many different meanings over the years,” she admitted, “it was about my grandmother at one point. It was about my dog.
"I've lost people, so it's always sort of fresh in my heart."
This isn’t the first time that Pink has been honest about her history with drugs. In her 2012 EW interview, the singer confessed that she understood addiction, as she “was a hardcore partier from 12 to 15. I was like a candy raver and I was on all the club drugs. Selling Ecstasy and crystal meth and Special K. I overdosed on Thanksgiving of ’95. And then I never took drugs again, ever.”
In the same year, Pink told Shape Magazine that although she wasn’t hospitalised, she got the wake-up call she needed, and turned her attention to her wildly successful music career.
Viewers of The Kelly Clarkson Show got a bonus look at that very career after the interview, with Pink and Kelly taking to the stage to perform a stunning duet of Pink’s ‘Who Knew’.
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