In December 2022, at a CLUB RENAISSANCE event in Beyoncé gave a rare and detailed look into her PRODUCTION process. Beyoncé is a record producer through and through “Hi, it’s Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, I had no idea what type of genre I would end up singing for B7, as the fans call this next album. But I tried to stay open and open my palette and discover aspects of myself or create something new. Whenever I start recording music, I give myself quite some time to play, I never wanna do the same thing twice, it bores me. I’m always up for a challenge and eventually the album reveals itself. I always wanted to make a record that I could work out to, you know, a record I could start and just play the whole thing and it would just pump me up. It’s a little bit over an hour and it’s exactly that. It just makes wanna move, it makes you wanna dance, it makes you laugh, it makes you wanna fall in love and it makes you wanna be with your man or your woman, it makes you just wanna have some joy and have some fun and that’s really all I wanted to do. I felt like that was my mission and that was my assignment. I was inspired by so many incredible artists, I knew if I was gonna do an album that had dance music elements, l would have to make it my own and mix a few things together, so I think it has elements of disco, techno, electronic and soul and still some elements of hip-hop. I wanted to give myself permission to just have fun, that’s the goal. Because I definitely had fun recording it. I love just being able to be free and be you know, a vocal acrobat and go back to my Destiny’s Child days and it made me feel like a kid and it made me happy. I am really passionate about all of the steps, you know, all of the aspects of the production, the arrangements, the vocal arrangements are my favorite, I love to stack vocals, and I love to create my own little oreo with arrangements, sometimes it can be thousands of vocals and you have to look at my sessions, it’s unbelievable, the amount of tracks, and the amount of versions, because after we finish all of that, I go back and then kind of piece things together, because usually the songs are way too long, it’s like seven, eight minutes then I have to cut them down which is never fun because all of it is part of the expression but can’t have a bunch of eight minute songs, so I go back and edit the structure of the song. And sometimes you mean for the intro to be an intro, you realize it’s actually the hook and after living with it, go back and make sure that all of every second flows into the next section and every section has an intention so that takes months then I usually live with the record for a while. I hear certain elements of things that go with things that are opposites. I am rarely happy with one track, it’s usually four or five things put together that again don’t really go together. I am so excited when I’m able to adjust the tempo and key and mute certain elements that don’t complement and put opposites together. Sometimes it’s just like the EQ of a synth or the warmth of a bass or the distortion of a bass that’s on a different song and I can hear like, ‘Ah! That’s exactly what is missing to make the track full and complete!’ So I take elements of different things and put them all together. You know sometimes that can take a long time, sometimes it just works like instantly. A lot of the songs right now are two minutes long, they’re super short because of people’s attention spans and I’m not gonna just accept that people don’t have the attention span, it’s not true, you just have to challenge people. I think people wanna hear good music and bridges and they wanna hear vamps and they wanna hear arrangements and they wanna hear melody, especially when it’s not a lot of it. I usually have people that suggest - ‘Oh cut the song down, you know that part is really slow, that’s not predictable, it messes up the flow when you’re dancing.’