Lea Michele met Cory Monteith on the set of “Glee”, where they found love. When he died suddenly over the summer after mixing alcohol and heroin, the actress went into a deep mourning that could only be eased by the outpouring of support she found from their fans and costars. Now, she’s set to release her first album, and says it contains a song she wrote just for Cory.

“We came up with a beautiful song called ‘If You Say So’ that I wrote about Cory,” she told Ellen DeGeneres. “Grief really just … you can get sucked into it. You can literally lose yourself if you don’t actually die from it, you can lose yourself completely. And I said to [Sia, Michele’s songwriter], ‘I need to get out of my house. He would want me to live my life. … ‘ She said, ‘Oh, that’s so crazy. ’cause I wrote this song. It’s called ‘Cannonball,’ and you just said the lyrics.’ She played it for me, and the minute I heard the song, it lifted me up. It picked me up from everything.”

Michele says Cory was able to hear a lot of her work before he passed.

“I’m really happy, because Cory got to hear all but two songs on the record, and he had notes all the time when I would come home and play him a song,” she said. “We would sit in the car and listen to it because it had the best sound system.”

Monteith’s death has been mourned by fans all over the world, and is felt in the community he dedicated himself to helping, a Vancouver charity called Project Limelight that helps troubled youths.

“I think kids really need a place to go and feel like they belong,” he said in a video for Project Limelight. “When I was a kid, I struggled a lot with who I was and where my life was going and what I was interested in. And I was fortunate to have the arts inspire me.”

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