Back in 2015, with Rick Astley’s 50th birthday on the horizon, the British singer-songwriter decided to make an album of new music for the first time in a decade. The idea was that it would make for a fun side project to Astley’s hugely enjoyable nostalgia gigs, which mainly draw on the “Never Gonna Give You Up” star’s ’80s catalogue (see his ebullient Glastonbury 2023 performance for reference). The resultant record was 2016’s 50—Astley’s first chart-topping UK album since his 1987 debut Whenever You Need Somebody—followed by 2018’s Beautiful Life. “I still love playing my old songs but I had a hankering to do something new,” Astley tells Apple Music. The balance found between touring the nostalgia circuit and that forward-facing new material feeds directly into Are We There Yet?. The seed for this breezy, Americana-tinged record was planted during a US tour alongside Salt-N-Pepa, En Vogue and New Kids On the Block in 2022. “We travelled around America, we did over 22,000 miles on a bus,” Astley recalls. “I think the sounds on this record, certainly the guitar parts, have been influenced by being in America for that length of time. You can be influenced by music without travelling there, but I do think there is something about crossing the Mississippi River five times on a tour that somehow it starts to seep in. I think it came home, the guitars are twangier, and I think there’s a certain something going on.” Looking back on the making of this album and the previous two, Astley has learned that it’s important to follow your instincts. “You’ve got to make your own record and hang in there with that,” he says. “You can’t make a record for everyone, so make it for you.” Join him on the journey as he guides us through Are We There Yet?, track by track. “Dippin My Feet” “This has got a tiny bit of a Rolling Stones thing in certain parts of it, in the chords and the middle eight. One of the lyrics is about not trusting people who work in the City because, these last few years, that whole thing of ‘do you believe anything anymore?’ has been pushed to the max. I’ve got friends who work in the City, so they texted me straight away when they heard that tune. I said, ‘No, I still love you’, because there’s a line about not trusting all those guys and girls who wear the same suit every day and do that job. It’s not a personal thing, and hark at me, I’m an ’80s pop star! I’ve got no room to talk about money and how I made it and all the rest of it. But I think it’s been a weird time these last few years. The great hope was that we’d come out of COVID, we’d had Brexit, governmentally they’ll slacken things a bit, they’ll let taxes be a bit easier, they’ll let this be a bit easier, and it seems to have gone the other way. Everything just seems to be more expensive for the people who can’t afford it. It’s insane.” “Letting Go” “Sometimes I’ll write a certain line in a song that may have a slight political undertone and sometimes I just want to write one that’s like, ‘You know what? We’ve just got to fall in love with each other and the answer to that is letting go.’ A friend of mine was asking me about lyrics the other day and I was saying, ‘To be honest, half the time I don’t know what they’re about. It’s just shit that comes out while you’re noodling and playing, and sometimes it just feels right and becomes part of the song.’ But the essence of this is it’s about letting go. It’s quite up and quite light, and it’s not a serious song in any way. There’s a tiny bit of Fleetwood Mac in there, just because I heard tons of Fleetwood Mac when we were in America last summer.” “Golden Hour” “We went to Nashville and there was music on every corner—Nashville just seems to live and breathe it a little more. ‘Golden Hour’ isn’t country exactly, but it’s definitely leaning on that and on that songwriting thing of trying to be as simple as possible. Some of the lyrics refer to my wife and I. We’ve known each other since 1987 and she manages me, so we work together. We travelled on buses around America for three months, and we realised that we are in a golden hour in the sense of age as well. You can be in a golden hour when you’re 20, but we also feel we’re getting on a bit and we have to enjoy this, because I don’t know how long anybody’s going to let me in a venue and sing anymore. We’re in a golden hour together as well because we’re still together after all these years. It’s pretty special.” “Never Gonna Stop” “It's a bit weird because obviously it goes, ‘Never gonna…’ a few times throughout the chorus. I thought that everyone immediately was going to pick up on that and go, ‘What are you doing?’ A few people did, but not everyone. I thought, ‘This is a bit weird, there’s no way I can do that’, so I wrote a completely different chorus and I played it to some close friends and they all said, ‘You have to go back to that one’, so I stuck with it. I’m not trying to pinch anything from the Stock Aitken Waterman [the songwriting/production trio behind ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’] guys or anything, it was just more of a hint at it. Lyrically, it’s about the speed at which the world is changing and the fact that it’s taking away the humanness from us. It’s a bit scary how fast it moves and how much we are reliant on social media, [which] is also screwing around with people in such a huge way. Somehow, we have to find the humanness in all of us again.” “Close (Your Shoes)” “I did quite a bit of therapy in my twenties, for lots of reasons. I wanted to delve into some of my childhood but I also felt I needed mending a little bit after what I went through as an ’80s pop star. It messes with you, big time. Your ego gets turned upside down, you don’t even know what ego is anymore, and how much to have of it and to push it or to bring it back. This song is about how I just want to feel close to somebody and the person I need to feel closest to is my wife. It does talk about feelings and emotions and things because I can’t write a song that says, ‘I just want to be close to you.’ Someone’s already done that.” “High Enough” “Do we all dream enough? Do we search for that bar that’s a bit further up? Did you reach high enough? Again, it’s reflective of my own life a little bit. As my manager and also as my wife, my wife is more confident about my stuff than me and probably pushes it more than I do. We’ll get an offer to do something and I’ll go, ‘I don’t know about that’, and she’ll say, ‘I know you can and it’s going to work out, it’ll be great.’ But it doesn’t have to be about my career, it can be about anything in life. It’s just that thing: ‘Did we actually really go for it?’.” “Forever and More” “This is simple, love song writing, about when you let someone down and they’re never going to forget it. I don’t think that’s relatable to me, necessarily. I do let my wife down sometimes, that’s for sure. I love the opening because it reminds me of Motown. Sometimes I just want to write a song somebody can dance to and sing along to.” “Driving Me Crazy” “My wife does drive me absolutely crazy and vice versa, but she drives me crazy in every sense of the word. There’s a line in the song that says something like, ‘Sometimes I question why we’re here’, and it says, ‘Just holding your hand takes away my fears.’ We have that [kind of] relationship. Like Glastonbury, which I never thought was ever going to happen, I thought that was a dream long gone, but we did that this summer [in 2023]—I was holding hands with my wife as I walked up to the stage.” “Maria Love” “Being the youngest, I used to watch things that I should not have been watching. I remember watching the news and being absolutely freaking terrified. I was born in ’66, so it was the early ’70s and stuff, the IRA was a massive thing. There were always bombings, you grew up watching things and thinking, ‘Wow, man, it’s terrifying.’ This is a little bit about seeing things through the eyes of a kid and being terrified. Also, I wanted to rescue it a little bit and have it be a chorus that people could sing along with.” “Take Me Back to Your Place” “This is probably the most contentious one on the album because of the lyrical bit of, ‘Throw me on the sofa, tie me to a chair, scratch me with your nails and pull my hair.’ It’s about somebody saying, ‘Take me back to your place just for one night and let’s just forget everything, I won’t even be here in the morning.’ I can’t even say that it’s personal to me, I have never done that. I wouldn’t tell you anyway, but I have never done that! I’ve got friends who’ve done it. It’s a mischievous sort of, ‘I’m in this town for one night, why don’t you just take me back to your place?’” “Waterfall” “I feel like life is a bit of a waterfall and I’m under it—and sometimes it feels lovely and it’s great and I’m having a lovely shower in it, it’s nature, and it’s wonderful. And sometimes I’m drowning and I’m really struggling. I feel I see that in a lot of my friends, and you see it in the wider world. It’s about the fact that life is amazing and great, but it’s also really tough sometimes, and we’re all under that waterfall and we do all need a little bit of healing sometimes. The hope is we’ll get through it and I think music sometimes gets me through it.” “Blue Sky” “We were so lucky in COVID that we had a back garden to sit in, where we could have bowls of pasta and a glass of wine and forget about what was going on in the world. This song was about that, drifting off into the blue sky and making peace with the world because we were confronted with death every single day. We live not far from Heathrow and we sometimes get the planes over. There was none of that, no cars, nothing. It did feel a bit eerie and a bit strange but also it felt like nature was going, ‘Just give us another year of this and we’ll claw a bit more back.’ I noticed things that I hadn’t noticed before, and it just made me think about life, but also that some people aren’t having this experience, some people are literally going through the worst thing possible. That’s what it’s about.”