I have a camp so I brought my writers, LaShawn Daniels and at the time, Anesha and Antea [Birchett], they were sisters, and this girl Delisha [Thomas] and Makeba [Riddick]. I brought basically five writers to work on different ideas. You either make the cut or you don't.

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.

She [Beyonce]is probably the closest thing we've seen to Michael Jackson as far as having that determination and drive that I've ever seen.

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.

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 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.