One year after Robin Thicke and Paula Patton got a divorce, the “Blurred Lines” singer experienced more heartbreak when his dad, beloved actor Alan Thicke, suddenly died in 2016. Instead of putting his music career on hold to mourn the loss of his father, Robin dove deeper into his work as a musician and poured his heart and emotions into his newest single, “Testify.”

“Well, it’s funny,” he recently told Zane Lowe on the Apple Music’s Beats 1 radio show. “My father passed away a couple of years ago and I thought I had an album and these songs that I wanted to put out. Then when that happened, it was something I wasn’t expecting and it just rattled my soul. So, I took some time to re-think the album and then these songs started pouring out that had more meaning and more weight to them.”

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Through the song, Robin, 41, showed fans just how much pain he experienced when his father passed away from a heart attack at age 69. The lyrics read, “It was the perfect day / And everything changed / I lost my father suddenly / Couldn’t keep it together, my family / And all my reckless ways caught up with me.”

However, once Robin opened up about his feelings in “Testify,” he started to feel a lot better. Of course, it would take him some time before he could move on following Alan’s death, but for Robin, creating new music was a great place to start.

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“Once you put it into song form, then it can live forever,” he said. “And so the message in the song is really about the hope and the light at the end of that tunnel when you feel that you lost or you feel that you don’t know what to do next. You know, that reconnection to God or spirituality or something deeper than the surface is what brings you back home to who you really are and who you want to be.”