Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Tina would go on to spend many years designing clothes for Destiny’s Child, and later Beyoncé. Most of the outfits worked very well and are definitely of a time and place, though a few even she would admit to perhaps being not the greatest of stage wear ever donned by a pop act.

  Today, the ever-enterprising Tina Knowles has expanded her brand into a number of clothing lines, including House of Deréon (for more expensive clothing, sold in better department stores), Deréon (a younger, more lifestyle brand), and Miss Tina (stylish but affordable clothes for the more mature woman). She most recently curated a collection of twenty-four designs from Caché, everything from trendy leather dresses to elegant ball gowns with crop tops, her favorites. “I’m mostly looking for things that will be flattering to every woman,” she says of choosing items for the collection. “Picking things that I know will work on many body types and many age groups.”

  Prepping for the Second Album

  We didn’t even know if there was going to be a second Destiny’s Child album,” Tina Knowles would once recall in a deposition. “I remember talking to the product manager at Columbia, who said the first album did okay but wasn’t as big as they hoped. It just did all right. [Actually, the album continued to sell long after its release.] So whether there would be another album remained to be seen. Our deal with Columbia called for seven albums, but only if the label exercised its option after each one. So, yes, we were stressing out a lot over whether or not to expect a second album. You can imagine how happy the household was when Mathew came home one day and said, ‘Yeah, they want it. It’s time to start working on album number two.’ Beyoncé and Kelly were jumping up and down and crying, and so was I!”

  Unlike Destiny Child’s debut album, where Beyoncé is credited with cowriting one song, during The Writing’s on the Wall, she would find herself working with a cadre of go-to writers and producers of the day, including Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, Kevin “She’kspere” Briggs, Kandi Burruss, Missy Elliott, Daryl Simmons, and D’Wayne Wiggins. In all, Beyoncé cowrote eleven of the album’s fifteen tracks; she is credited as a producer or coproducer on seven of them. “At this point, Beyoncé was really emerging as a songwriter,” recalled her publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure. “You can’t just sit on that. It was time for her to get those juices flowing, to start writing.”

  In preparation for the group’s second opus, the girls sat down with pads and pens and made copious notes about what they liked about their debut recording, and what they weren’t quite as happy about. “Beyoncé told me that there were elements of the first album she thought were maybe too mature,” Daryl Simmons said. “She told me, ‘Shoot! We’re just teenagers. We want to have more fun than that.’ So there was definitely a concentrated effort to create an album that was younger in its appeal than the debut.”

  Some of this second album would be recorded at SugarHill Recording Studios in Houston, one of the world’s oldest (along with Abbey Road Studios in London) and, arguably, most famous studios in the world. Record producer and engineer Dan Workman is the president and CEO of the operation; he and his partner, Rodney Meyers, purchased the studio in 1996. Workman had been producing music since 1988, when he cut his teeth working with ZZ Top. By 1998, when he met Beyoncé, he was in his midforties.

  “My wife, Christi, was working as studio manager,” Dan Workman recalled, “and she came to me one day and said, ‘Do you know a guy named Mathew Knowles?’ I answered, ‘Nope, never heard of him.’ She goes, ‘Well, he’s on the phone and wants to book time for his daughter.’ This was very common, you know, dads wanting to book studio time for their kids’ little bands, or whatever. She said, ‘He’s insistent and he can’t believe we’ve never heard of his girl’s band.’ I said, ‘Well, what’s its name?’ And she said, ‘Destiny’s Child.’ ‘Never heard of ’em.’ She said they were signed to Columbia, Wyclef Jean had produced their first hit, and the label was going to be paying for the sessions. Well, all of that piqued my interest. Anytime it’s not the dad who’s paying for the sessions out of his own pocket, that’s good news. So I said, ‘Great, let’s bring her in.’

  “A few days later, Mathew showed up at the studio with Beyoncé,” Dan Workman recalled. “I actually thought the whole group was coming in, but no, it was just Beyoncé. Mathew was scoping out the studio, and she was behind him, taking it all in. Both were very intense. You could tell that for them this was serious business.

  “He’d brought along some tracks she’d been working on, I spooled them, he left, and she went into the booth and started singing,” Dan Workman continued. “Within five minutes, I realized, ‘Okay, this is not just some teenager trying to be a singer. This is a real vocalist.’ You could tell she knew her way around a studio. The way she intuitively used the microphone and asked for feedback showed a level of professionalism far beyond her years. She was even using terminology that was opaque to me. She’d say, ‘Okay, cool. Let’s start at the B section’ [the ‘bridge’ or ‘middle eight’ of a song].’ She also started schooling me on R&B music production, telling me how to double and triple different runs, copy and layer her vocals to make her one voice sound like a group of singers, all standard stuff in R&B, but I was this old rock-and-roll punk white guy who had never done soul music. While it felt a little weird having this teenager drive the session, she was so good I was blown away by the whole thing.

  “At the end of the day, Mathew came to pick her up,” Workman concluded. “ ‘Man, we had a great time,’ I told him. ‘She’s charming, easy to work with. We had a real rapport. Hope to see you guys back here one day.’ You could tell he was happy to hear these compliments. The next thing I knew, he booked a week of studio time with the talented producer She’kspere.”

  The Writing’s on the Wall

  She’kspere (whose real name is Kevin Briggs) was best known for just having produced TLC’s big hit “No Scrubs,” very much the kind of feminist song for which Destiny’s Child was becoming known. He, along with his wife at the time, Kandi Burruss (from the female trio Xscape and who had also collaborated with She’kspere on “No Scrubs”), would join forces on productions of new songs for the second Destiny’s Child album, which would be called The Writing’s on the Wall.

  Much of The Writing’s on the Wall was written on the spot, while DC was in the studio recording it. Often the process was as impromptu as Beyoncé reaching into a stash of CDs of instrumental tracks that had been submitted by various producers and giving several of them a listen. She’d then decide which ones to complete by adding to them a vocal melody and lyric right there on the spot, sometimes with the help of the other girls. Then the group would instantly record what they’d come up with. It was a strange way of making records (and an even stranger way of writing songs). In a normal scenario, the song would already be written, its lyrics handed to the artist in the recording booth. Then, as the artist sang over the prerecorded track, a producer would oversee the endeavor. This standard process happened sometimes too, but for the most part Beyoncé and Destiny’s Child charted their own course in the studio.

  “The way these girls worked was totally unique to me,” Dan Workman said. “They would come, take off their coats, kick off their shoes, make themselves at home in the studio, and write songs right there on the spot, just eating Cheetos and coming up with lines. Beyoncé would have most of it outlined, then one girl would add a word, and another would add a phrase and on and on . . .” It should be noted that it doesn’t take much to get a songwriting credit in popular music these days. If one of the group members added so much as a single word—voilà!—she would get a songwriting credit . . . and royalties forever more.

  “Kandi Burruss was very influential in this process,” said Dan Workman. “She and Beyoncé worked well together. They had a way of grabbing hooks out of thin air, or turning phrases and finding rhymes. Kandi was She’kspere’s secret weapon. She was like the heavyweight in the room, and Beyoncé was soaking up every bit of knowledge from her.” (Today, Kandi
Burruss is a regular on “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” television program.) “But there was often no actual recording going on,” Workman continued, “just these sort of workshop dates.

  “At one point, I told Mathew, ‘I don’t even know how to bill you for these strange sessions! Basically, we’re just housing a bunch of kids and then ordering in lunch for them. Sometimes they actually record something.’ He laughed and said, ‘Well, figure it out, because that’s their process, and it works for them.’ ”

  A telling moment occurred during the writing process for the song “Bills, Bills, Bills,” one that Dan Workman says he’ll never forget. All of the girls had their pencils and pads out and were trying to come up with a line. However, everyone was drawing a blank. Suddenly, something came to Workman, just a little phrase. “How about . . .” he began, and then he blurted out his idea. “The room went dead,” he recalled. “It was as if I had farted in church. There had been all of this excitement for the song and then, suddenly, within seconds, the girls just quit working on it. Finally, Beyoncé said, ‘Okay, ladies, let’s move on to something else now, shall we?’ I was hurt.” It could be that he had simply interrupted their flow, but after thinking about it, Dan theorized that the girls knew, even back then, that giving him a songwriting credit meant giving him a royalty too. “So I learned my lesson,” he concluded, laughing, “which was, ‘Dan, keep your big fat mouth shut when Beyoncé and her group are writing their songs.’ ”

  With The Writing’s on the Wall, the public would be able to experience the development of the distinctive style Beyoncé had started to toy with on the first Destiny’s Child record. On the new “Bills, Bills, Bills,” for instance, the syncopation she came up with for the chorus was very unusual. In fact, there had never been anything in pop or R&B that sounded quite like it. It had to do with the rhythm of the song and the way she was able to work around and inside the downbeat in a way that was completely unique. “With ‘Bills, Bills, Bills,’ that was the first time I had ever heard anyone do anything like that,” recalled Dan Workman. “I remember thinking, ‘That’s so weird, so experimental. Can that be a hit record?’ And son of a bitch if it wasn’t.”

  With Beyoncé there was no frame of reference for what she had created stylistically. For instance, the late Michael Jackson was obviously very good at timing and swinging the beat in a traditional R&B way. He was incredibly knife-edged about it, razor sharp in fact. Some might argue, though, that his style was actually a refined derivative of what James Brown and maybe Otis Redding and Jackie Wilson had done before him. While Michael made it fresh and took it to places it had never gone before, there was at least some precursor to it. Beyoncé’s style had no popular frame of reference whatsoever.

  That said, Anthony Moore—Tony Mo.—wrote a song for Girls Tyme called “Blue Velvet,” which featured many of these same kinds of staccato phrasings. This was the song Ashley Davis had trouble recording when Beyoncé was sent into the studio to relieve her—the defining moment in Beyoncé’s career when everyone present suddenly realized what they had in her. Considering that an artist usually takes the totality of her experiences with her wherever she goes, there’s little doubt that Beyoncé’s distinctive style was influenced by her foundational work with Tony Mo. “ ‘Blue Velvet’ was right in the pocket,” he recalled, “and I would hear that same influence in a lot of her Destiny’s Child performances.”

  The second DC album would also include, “Jumpin’ Jumpin’,” which would mark Beyoncé’s first time receiving both writer and producer credits. She is credited with Chad Elliott and Rufus Moore on the writing and Elliott and Jovonn Alexander on the production.

  At the time, Chad Elliott was an accomplished writer and producer with an extensive background working with, among many others, the Motown female group 702. One day he received a phone call from Teresa LaBarbera Whites telling him that she wanted him to meet “this great group in Houston.” He flew to Texas from New York and met Mathew and Destiny’s Child over a seafood dinner. This was back when they were working on the first album. Unfortunately, the timing was off, and Elliott wasn’t able to contribute to that one. By the time they got to the second album, though, he was ready and eager.

  For consideration, Elliott and his cowriter, Rufus Moore, and coproducer, Jovonn Alexander, sent Mathew a bunch of songs they’d been working on—musical tracks with no vocals. By mistake, the CD they submitted contained a song called “The Ambush Crew.” Mathew loved the track and gave it to Beyoncé. She sat with it a few days and wrote the lyrics to what she would then call “Jumpin’ Jumpin’.”

  “So I get this song back from Mathew one day with all of these new lyrics,” Chad Elliott recalled. “I was freaking out because we never intended to send that song to Mathew. It was a total accident. It was a tune I was working on for a personal project. Then I heard the new lyrics, and I was blown away. I had intended it to be a rap record. When it came back to me, I was like, ‘Whoa! What the heck is this? How did this happen?’ Now it was a call for women to leave their significant others at home and go out clubbing. It was a female twist that took me by surprise: ‘Ladies, leave your man at home, the club is full of ballers and their pockets full grown.’ There was something democratic about it, too, because it was also telling men to do the same thing, without their women. I called Mathew right away and explained to him that the track had been submitted by accident.”

  “Well, what do you want to do, Chad?” Mathew asked. “Because you have to admit that what my daughter did with your track is pretty damn hot.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Chad said, laughing. “It’s hotter than hot. Let me talk to my crew and get back to you.”

  Ultimately, Chad decided that the opportunity was too good to pass up. Thus it came to pass that “Jumpin’ Jumpin’ ” would be the song with the distinction of being the very first one credited to Beyoncé as a cowriter and also coproducer.

  Beyoncé’s unique syncopated style of phrasing was also exemplified by “Jumpin’ Jumpin’.” “I think it was a whole new sound for a lot of people,” she would recall. “The fans didn’t even understand some of the lyrics. But that was the fun of it. They would have to play the song a million times just to get the lyrics straight, and in playing it over and over they got to love it even more. So it was sort of my way of getting them to give the song more than just a quick listen.”

  Also noteworthy on the second album would be the somber “Say My Name,” the embittered calling-out of a man who insists he’s in love with his girl but is suspiciously reluctant about expressing it when he’s talking to her on the phone. It would become a classic Destiny’s Child song, credited to all four girls in the group as songwriters, as well as Rodney Jerkins, Fred Jerkins III, and LaShawn Daniels. There was also the uptempo “Bug a Boo,” a clever critique of a potential suitor who in the initial meeting is cool and collected, but once he gets a girl’s phone number and e-mail address reveals himself to be a pest. Again, all four girls are credited as songwriters, as well as She’kspere and Kandi Burruss. Both songs are about subjects that love songs have covered since the beginning of time, but with a frankness that girl groups had rarely expressed in the past.

  The Writing’s on the Wall would debut at number six on the Billboard 200 on August 14, 1999, and spend an astonishing ninety-nine consecutive weeks on that chart. It would earn Destiny’s Child six Grammy nominations. After “Say My Name” won two Grammys, the album did even more gangbusting business, ultimately selling almost ten million copies in the United States alone. Of its four singles, two—“Bills, Bills, Bills” and “Say My Name”—reached number one on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart. “At that point, I could see the press returning my calls a little sooner and with a little more enthusiasm,” recalled Yvette Noel-Schure. “[They would say] ‘I’m calling about Destiny’s Child’! As opposed to, ‘Yeah, well, I got that press package on that group . . .’ ”

  Lydia Modelist-Aston, a member of the choir at St. John’s Unit
ed Methodist Church in Houston, recalled, “I remember Tina, Beyoncé, and Kelly coming to church one Sunday and sitting in the balcony, as they always did. Pastor Rudy [Rasmus] looked up to the balcony and said, ‘Hey! Bey! I need to ask you a question. I just need to know one thing: Can you pay my bills?’ Everybody fell out laughing, and then the band started playin’ ‘Bills, Bills, Bills.’ Everyone was so proud of the girls, the congregation wanted to celebrate with them.”

  “I had a song on that second album, too,” recalled Daryl Simmons, “which was ironic considering the trouble Mathew and I had in the past with the Elektra deal. But he called me and said, ‘I’m looking for a ballad, something Beyoncé can really enjoy singing.’ I said, ‘Wow. I would be honored. Great!’ So I wrote a very pretty song called ‘Stay’ just for her.” With its solid verses, obvious hook, and strong bridge, “Stay,” a love song about conflicted romance, seems almost traditional among all the hip-hop-influenced R&B on The Writing’s on the Wall.