Apr 25, 2016
With the release of Beyoncé's sixth album Lemonade this past Saturday, April 23, came an audio-visual film, and a Tidal-exclusive stream (though it's also now available on iTunes).
According to Pitchfork, Lemonade's credits are 3105 words long. Collaborators including James Blake, Kendrick Lamar, Jack White, and The Weeknd were all part of the massive group of people that saw to Lemonade's creation and today, Father John Misty and Ezra Koenig have both offered details of their respective contributions to the album track "Hold Up."
Koenig's involvement was inspired by his own Twitter activity, and kind of goes all the way back to 2003 when The Yeah Yeah Yeah's released their song "Maps." In 2011 he tweeted his own alterations to that song's lyrics, and then in 2014 used the altered lyrics whilst writing with Diplo to write a hook.
Still with us? Cool. Cut to the release of Lemonade and it turns out Beyoncé morphed the demo that Diplo and Koenig made into her own song.
Koenig was sure to make sure everyone was credited accordingly.
https://twitter.com/arzE/status/724660587523805184
songs become tweets, tweets become songs - it's the way of the world
— Ezra Koenig (@arzE) April 25, 2016
Father John Misty wrangled his way onto Lemonade with his previously unmentioned mastery of "the airhorn." Read his Tweets below, which chronicle his journey.
https://twitter.com/fatherjohnmisty/status/724685015997644800
https://twitter.com/fatherjohnmisty/status/724682943579471872
https://twitter.com/fatherjohnmisty/status/724681772861149184
https://twitter.com/fatherjohnmisty/status/724681772861149184
https://twitter.com/fatherjohnmisty/status/724681085888696321
https://twitter.com/fatherjohnmisty/status/724680867034071040
https://twitter.com/fatherjohnmisty/status/724680294654054400
https://twitter.com/fatherjohnmisty/status/724292533833093121
After these tweets, the singer shared with Pitchfork a statement detailing his actual involvements, and to be honest, the true story is probably more impressive. The statement reads:
"About a year and half ago, my friend Emile Haynie played Beyonce some of my music, along with some tunes I've written for other people, back when she was looking for collaborators for the record...Pretty soon after they sent along the demo for "Hold Up", which was just like a minute of the sample and the hook. I'm pretty sure they were just looking for lyrics, but I went crazy and recorded a verse melody and refrain too that, unbelievably - when you consider how ridiculous my voice sounds on the demo - ended up making the record - right between picking up the baseball bat and decapitating the fire hydrant.
I was mostly kind of in the dark, my involvement with the record kind of ends with me just sending off the demo, it wasn't until she came to my Coachella set in 2015 and told me personally it had made the record that I really had anything concrete with which to convince my friends that I hadn't actually gone insane."
Image credit: diffuser.fm