Emeli Sandé on Her Too-Cool-for-School Pompadour and Social Media Songwriting Project

Don’t get us wrong: We appreciate a good pop song just as much as the next person, but before we even heard Emeli Sandé’s soulful ballads—infused with the perfect tinge of folk rock and ‘90s R&B—we were completely enthralled by her hair. To be more specific, her epic Pompadour ‘do.
Perched atop the Scottish singer-songwriter’s head like a mountaintop, Sandé’s expertly coiffed Pompadour is the perfect blend of past and present: A mound of hair swept upward from the face, styled sometimes in curls, sometimes like an 80s punk rocker s Mohawk, with the sides of the head trimmed close to the surface à la Ellie Goulding in 2011. “Every now and then it needs a touch-up,” she told InStyle. “I like making sure everything’s neat and shaved right.” A bit modest, sure, but Sandé insists that her seemingly complex hairstyle requires little more than a 20-minute-long blowdry. “I use a little bit of oil to keep it in place too,” she added.
When Sandé’s not busy tending to her tresses, she’s of course penning award-winning tracks, like the infectious, piano-pulsating “Next to Me” off her 2013 debut album Our Version of Events. For her next sure to be chart-topping single, the artist is taking a novelty approach: She’s teaming up with Jaguar—and thousands of Twitter users—to write what’s arguably the first-ever song to be generated from a hashtag.
With Jaguar’s new online platform FEEL XE, Sandé will write a song about “the feeling of exhilaration” to support the reveal of Jaguar’s new XE sports sedan (pictured above). How? By asking the public, quite simply, “What makes you feel exhilarated?” Using #FEELXE, users can then try their hand at songwriting via social media by tweeting, Instagramming, or Facebooking what makes them feel just so. “I just want to capture feelings of excitement and things I haven’t thought of or experienced before, Sandé said. A song always comes from a conversation—I look at this as one massive one.”
So what makes Sandé feel exhilarated? (Besides her hair, of course.) “The moment when a song is conceived—it’s such a high that I’ve gotten addicted to, and it’s magical.”
To help Sandé create her new song, share what makes you feel exhilarated on any social channel using the hashtag #FEELXE.