Dua Lipa stopped byThe Late Show With Stephen ColbertThursday evening for an extended interview where she talked everything from her upcoming Future Nostalgia tour, her new Service95 newsletter — and how she once answered a FaceTime call from Elton John while wearing only a bikini and a cowboy hat.
The British pop singer even turned the tables on Colbert, asking him a deeply personal and thoughtful question about the impact of his Catholic faith on his comedy. Interviewing, she says, is a skill she’s been developing as she’s been working on the rollout of Service95 and her “At Your Service” podcast.
“I’m really enjoying interviewing people, I really am,” Lipa says. “And I really love the research element about it and learning about people.”
Lipa, who Rolling Stone named “the breakout pop star of the pandemic era,” released her critically acclaimed sophomore LP Future Nostalgia in the early days of Covid lockdowns and restrictions — something the singer believes allowed fans to connect with the music on a deeper, more meaningful level.
“With so much uncertainty and everything going on, I was like, ‘You know, maybe now is the time to release this album.’ And, I’m really happy that I did,” she says. “I have this whole philosophy that, up until the point the music gets released, it belongs to me. Once it’s out, it’s no longer is mine…People’s reaction, having been that the way that it was, was just mindblowing. It was beyond anything that I could have ever hoped for, and maybe that was actually the fate that the album was actually meant to have.”
The “Levitating” singer also shared the story behind how she was asked to participate in “Cold Heart,” her 2021 remote collaboration with Elton John, which features interpolations of John’s 1989 ballad “Sacrifice,” his 1972 smash “Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going to Be a Long, Long Time),” 1983’s “Kiss the Bride,” and 1976’s “Where’s the Shoorah?”
“I was hanging out by the pool before going to do some writing, and all of a sudden my phone rings, and it’s a FaceTime from Elton and his husband, David — casual,” she jokes.
“I feel like I manifested this, in a way,” she explains of the collaboration. “‘Rocket Man’ is my driving song, it’s my shower song, it’s my song I sing along to myself…When I got asked to sing that part, I was like, ‘OK, it was just meant to be.’”
The long-postponedFuture Nostalgia world tour will kick off Feb. 9 in Miami and end Nov. 16 in Perth, Australia. Lipa tells Colbert fans should come into the shows with high expectations.
“I’ve done a lot of audience research, and so I feel like I know what songs people like,” she explains.