When she needed a lyric video for her new single, “Anything Could Happen,” Ellie Goulding turned to her fans — by crowd sourcing their Instagram skills. Her video featured 1,200 photos Instagrammed in that represented a word or lyric from her song.

“People love it,” Goulding said in an interview with CBS Local. “I Instagram photos of shoes and me and clothes and people are like, ‘Arrrh, I love it!’ Then I Instagram a photo of a view and they’re like, ‘Meh.’”

Goulding doesn’t tailor her own Instagram behavior to what gets the most likes, however.

“I’ll Instagram whatever I want, but I’ve noticed that more people tend to like photos of me.”

For fans who follow her online, Goulding’s Instagram is a great way to get an idea of what the singer is wearing on any given day, covering everything from six-inch platforms to a backpack. And though a photo is worth a thousand words, even an Instagram feed full of photos can’t quite capture Goulding’s essence.

“People describe me as a happy, silly, bubbly person. But then my songs are like, well the next album are pretty dark and you just wouldn’t think so. You’d expect me to walk in and be like, ‘Ugh, I hate everything.’”

Some of Goulding’s darkness comes out on her forthcoming, album Halcyon.

“Depending on what I’ve written, all my lyrics are like that really. ‘Anything Could Happen’ is quite positive though. I’m glad there’s one song which is. I don’t know, that’s just my writing style I suppose. That’s just how I’ve been since I was very young. I think about things a lot and it turns out, it’s a dark world out there,” she laughs.

That paradox of darkness and light doesn’t just appear in her songwriting, but in her choice of friends. Goulding opened up about her close friendship with Jessie J, who is seemingly as dissimilar from Goulding as can be.

“We are kind of opposites, but she makes me laugh and I make her laugh. We understand each other to a degree because of the lives we have.”

Goulding’s sophomore album, Halcyon, is out on October 9.

-Courtney E. Smith, CBS Local