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 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.

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

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.

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.

Anytime a person has Disney World in their backyard, you know they're thinking big.

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.