I remember when I first got the call from Beyoncé to work on the project, and the mood that she was in and she was feeling, she wanted New Orleans-inspired music to be incorporated to the stuff she was doing. Creole-type stuff. Zydeco... She wanted that type of inspiration.

It's just kind of, we do a lot of songs when it's an artist of that magnitude, like Beyoncé. You're not sending her one song; you're sending her 20 ideas.

Beyonce gave us direction, and she had like four or five studios going at one time, but then she only sings what she likes. "Back Up" was one of those records.

I did like seven songs on Michael Jackson's Invincible album, but I might have done 60 songs to get to those seven. You don't know what's going to happen.

Beyonce is more mature, she's her own woman. She always had it in her.

That's common in our industry, where some songs make the cut, some don't. It's bad when it doesn't make the cut and you don't get in on the project.

It's not a normal recording shift where you do a song and you get a day to tweak it and the third day you mix it. It's like double the work in the period of time it would take to do one.