Beyoncé is officially back. The artist released “Break My Soul,” a new song off her upcoming album, and, predictably, everyone is talking. As Beyoncé slowly doles out more details about her forthcoming project, fans are clamoring for all the information they can get.
Big Freedia, the pioneer of bounce, has now let fans in on what it’s like to work on a Beyoncé track. In an interview with Page Six, the rapper discussed her collaboration with Queen Bey on “Break My Soul.”
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Freedia has appeared on a Beyoncé track before, having been sampled on her smash-hit single “Formation” in 2016. But the excitement was just as high when Beyoncé’s team reached out to her again to ask to sample vocals from Freedia’s 2014 track “Explode.” According to Freedia, she was “grateful” and “humbled” when she got the call, and was “blown away” when she got to hear the track’s final form at Beyoncé’s recording studio in Los Angeles.
“The speakers were like jumping at me,” Freedia described. “The bass was coming out of the speakers so heavy. I was in there just like shaking and like excited and overwhelmed.” Just as she was about to leave, one of Beyoncé’s reps came up to her and said, “Do you want to talk to the queen? She’s here.”
The question was a no-brainer. “I was like, ‘Holy crap. You know I wanna talk to her!'” Freedia recalled, and said that the two embraced and talked for a while. Said Freedia: “She thanked me for being on her track. And I’m like, ‘No, thank you for having me as a guest on the track!'” Freedia is certainly happy with the final product. “This is something that we all need,” she said of the song. “This is the summer anthem. It is something that will bring us all back together on the dance floor. It’s powerful. It’s inspiration. It’s motivation. It’s gonna have people… in clubs dancing. It’s gonna have people in workout rooms dancing. In the gym. I mean, everywhere.”
[via]