Timbaland With Jermaine Dupri, Bow Wow & P. Diddy
Timbaland With Jermaine Dupri
Timbaland With Jermaine Dupri & P. Diddy
Showing posts with label Pharrell Williams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pharrell Williams. Show all posts
Timbaland Recieves 'Lifetime Achievement Award' By Pharrell Williams At The Global Spin Awards (2018)
Timbaland With Pharrell
Timbaland With Jermaine Dupri, Bow Wow & P. Diddy
Timbaland With Jermaine Dupri
Timbaland With Jermaine Dupri & P. Diddy
Timbaland With Jermaine Dupri, Bow Wow & P. Diddy
Timbaland With Jermaine Dupri
Timbaland With Jermaine Dupri & P. Diddy
Justin Timberlake In The Studio With Timbaland & Danjahandz (2017)
It looks like we’re getting a Justified 2.0 after all. It’s been nearly four years since Justin Timberlake shut down the Pop/R&B game and went back-to-back with The 20/20 Experience and The 20/20 Experience – 2 of 2. And while he’s worked on a handful of projects since—namely the Trolls soundtrack, which featured his chart-topping single “Can’t Stop The Feeling“—we’ve yet to hear what the 36-year-old star has in store for his proper follow-up.
We’ll still have to wait on the music, but a recent Instagram post from Timberlake suggests he’s hard at work on the project. Even more promising, the IG post featured Pharrell and Timbaland, two legendary producers who have played a major role in the sound and success of JT’s solo career. What’s more, Danja, who works closely with Timbaland, said he and Timbo along with The Neptunes (Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo) were working on a project together. Stay tuned for more info.
Timbaland With Danjahandz & Pharrell Williams
Kap G, Justin Timberlake, Timbaland, Danjahandz & Pharrell Williams
What u think u gon get if I'm with Tim in one room... and Pharrell and Chad in another room at the same time on the same project???— DANJA (@only1DANJA) March 29, 2017
Missy Elliott - Pep Rally (P. Williams) (16')
Missy Elliott is back with a brand new single titled ’Pep Rally’ produced by Pharrell Williams. Missy is preppin’ her new album completely produced by Pharrell and Timbaland and this is another example what the album will sound like. Missy Elliott has used the Super Bowl 50 occasion to drop ’Pep Rally’ that should get even the most casual of sports fans amped for the big game. ’Pep Rally’ is Missy's first release since her comeback record, the Pharrell-featuring "WTF," which dropped in November.
The new track was shared without any warning or promotion and intends to prove that she's only been heating up since. The beat is made up of typical game-day sounds -- whistles along with marching band-style cymbals and horn -- as well as a heavy bass that helps transform the track into a certified banger and watch the Super Bowl 50 Commercial at Alec Baldwin’s game day party with Missy Elliott and Co, check iot out below and make sure to get the single on Amazon.
Missy Elliott - Pep Rally (P. Williams) (16') *amazon.com
Missy Elliott Talks Timbaland On OTHERtone With Pharrell Williams & Scott Vener
Missy Elliott has been OTHERtone’s latest guest where she opened up about her legacy, and Working with Pharrell, Timbaland and Puff Daddy. They also discussed how they all meet the first time, check it out below, thanks to 3000. OTHERtone Episode 13 With Pharrell Williams, Scott Vener & Missy Elliott (2016)
- Missy Elliott - The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)
- Tweet - Oops (Oh My) feat. Missy Elliott
- Petey Pablo - Raise Up
- Rihanna - Rehab
- Usher - You Make Me Wanna…
- Nicole - Make It Hot feat. Missy Elliott & Mocha
- Fabolous - Make Me Better feat. Ne-Yo
- Justin Timberlake - What Goes Around… / …Comes Around
- Justin Timberlake - Mirrors
- Nelly Furtado - Say It Right
- Nelly Furtado - Promiscuous feat. Timbaland
- Timbaland - Give It To Me feat. Justin Timberlake & Nelly Furtado
- Jodeci - Come & Talk To Me
- Case - Touch Me Tease Me feat. Foxy Brown
- Total - Can’t You See feat. The Notorious B.I.G.
- Majid Jordan - King City
- Shailou - After
- Missy Elliott - WTF (Where They From) feat. Pharrell
- Missy Elliott - Gossip Folks feat. Ludacris
- Missy Elliott - Sock It 2 Me feat. Da Brat (Amended Version)
- Missy Elliott - Hot Boyz
- Missy Elliott - All N My Grill
- Missy Elliott - One Minute Man feat. Ludacris
- Missy Elliott - Get Ur Freak On
- DVSN - Hallucinations
Missy Elliott - WTF (Where They From) feat. Pharrell (Official Video) (2015)
Here is Missy Elliott’s new single produced and featuring Pharrell Williams, directed by Dave Meyers and Missy Elliott.
Missy Elliott - WTF (Where They From) feat. Pharrell (Official Video) (2015)
Pharrell Williams - Brand New feat. Justin Timberlake (With Timbaland Beatboxing) (14')
The 'Get Lucky' hitmaker released his second studio album on iTunes Radio for streaming says he is ''happy to share'' an early preview of G I R L, ahead of its official release on March 3, and all the tracks have been made available to listen to on iTunes radio. There is a tune on the album titled ‘Brand New’ featuring Justin Timberlake and Timbaland doing the beatbox on the Pharrell produced tune. ''Imagine if all of the talk show hosts in the world were women, all of the presidents were women, this is my gift to them. This album is dedicated to women across the world.'' Make sure to cop G I R L on iTunes, check out the tune below. *itunes.apple.com
Congrats at the 2014 Grammys!!
It's time for us to extend our arms in Salute to Timbaland, Pharrell, Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake for their successes in the 2014 Grammys! Guess that's more plaques for the wall!
The awards are as follows:
Timbaland
Best R&B Song (A Songwriters Award)
"Pusher Love Girl" - J. Timberlake, T. Mosley, J. Fauntleroy, J. Harmon
Pharrell
Record Of The Year
"Get Lucky" - Daft Punk, Pharrell Williams
Best Pop Duo/Group Performance
"Get Lucky" - Daft Punk, Pharrell Williams
Producer of the Year, Non-Classical
"BBC" - Jay-Z
"Blurred Lines" - Robin Thicke Ft. T.I. & Pharrell
"Happy" (Pharrell Williams)
"I Can't Describe (The Way I Feel)" - Jennifer Hudson Ft. T.I.
"Nuclear" - Destiny's Child
"Oceans" - Jay-Z Ft. Frank Ocean
"Reach Out Richard" - Mayer Hawthorne
"The Stars Are Ours" - Mayer Hawthorne
Jay-Z
Best Rap/Sung Collaboration
"Holy Grail" - Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake
Justin Timberlake
Best Music Video
"Suit & Tie" - Justin Timberlake Ft. Jay-Z (David Fincher, video director; Timory King, video producer)
Year of quality it was, especially on the JT & JZ part, well done to you both!!
A MASSIVE congratulations to Pharrell for once again paving the road for great musical enjoyment!!
And of course a major salute to Timbaland for the outstanding production he's provided during the past year, here's to you!!
Let's cap off the celebrations with a Timberlake/Timbaland mix courtesy of DJ Dome & DJ Dirty Draws to remember all the good music we received during 2013!
New Beyonce featuring Timbland tracks Buy on Itunes now!!! Music Video 30 sec preview!
Yonce/Partition
Rocket
Grown Woman
Timbaland No Damn Cliff - NYMag article
Here is a very well-written summary biography article from New York Magazine online which will make for a properly good read that we'll add to this site for archive's sake. Also we see a sneak peak of a new song entitled "Been It".
Grab your glasses (both reading and drinking), get comfy, as this will take a while:
Part 1: Introduction - No Damn Cliff
The weather keeps changing. Five minutes ago, the sky above Key Biscayne was clear blue, the palm trees were swaying in time with the music, and the sun was shining like it been hired for the occasion. Which, given the occasion, didn’t seem entirely implausible. But then, just like that, the air went from sultry to heavy. The wind was whipping through the palm fronds and the hair of the girls dancing on the beach. When the director of the music video—a man named X—looked up, there they were: a gang of clouds, rolling up on the scene like so much bad news. “Back!” someone yelled to the group of workmen wheeling a giant floodlight across the sand, who reversed course just as fat raindrops began to fall, sending the extras in their bikinis, the label people with their iPhones, and the stylist in leather shorts skittering toward shelter.
Only Timbaland, the video’s star, remains unfazed. Leaning against a royal palm, clad in a nautically themed sweatshirt, a massive gold chain featuring the head of Jesus dangling from his neck, he continues lip-synching the chorus of “Been It,” which will appear on his next album: “For your information, baby,” the song, an upbeat, heavily Auto-Tuned number that calls to mind early Snoop Dogg, goes, “I’m-a make sure and tell you ’bout these hoes.” It was written with Pharrell Williams, a friend of Timbaland’s from high school who is, like him, a world-famous producer and performer of cheerfully vulgar pop music. Pharrell Williams is expected later this afternoon to film a scene for the video, which will take place on a yacht, if—the director looks at the sky—the weather improves. Right now, the water is gray and choppy. A gust of wind blows, and Jesus, bouncing around on Timbaland’s sweatshirt, looks momentarily like He is clamoring for a life preserver. “Hoes,” continues Timbaland, who seems intent on fulfilling the song’s promise no matter what. “So many hoes.”
Then, as swiftly as they arrived, the clouds pass. The sun reemerges, along with the label people, the fashion guy, and the video girls, who are shaking water out of their hair like What was that?
“Miami,” someone shrugs.
“So many hoes,” Timbaland mouths. He adds a little eyebrow raise this time.
As a longtime denizen of both a tempestuous state and industry, Timbaland—real name: Timothy Mosley—knows how quickly the atmosphere can change. Five years ago, he was at the top of his game. The biggest names in the music business were clamoring for his production skills: Madonna, Beyoncé, Björk, M.I.A., Kanye West, Duran Duran, Jay Z. Everything he touched turned to platinum. Then, the clouds rolled in. The industry changed, tastes changed. “Every year changes, every generation,” he’d said the night before, sitting in the recording studio in Miami’s Setai hotel, surrounded by equipment that will, like all things, one day be outmoded. The inevitability of this doesn’t make it any less surprising when it happens, especially to a person. “I feel like I was getting whacked,” Mosley says. “The music of today, it’s not like the music I’m making. And, um. It just …”
He trails off. A bit of disbelief still lingering in his eyes, which are, like everything else about Mosley, big and round. For a while, he was very, very buff, but even with massive biceps, he’s one of those men who just can’t help but look like a large baby. But solid. Established, he thought. Which is why he was surprised when the winds of change swept in and blew him off the charts. “It was humbling,” he says.
For a while, he disappeared. There were rumors of drugs, financial insolvency, and depression. Then, this year, he was back, doing his thing on Jay Z’s Magna Carta Holy Grail and Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience (Parts 1 and 2), like his same old self. But not quite. “This is New Tim,” he says, laying a (big, round) hand on his chest. “I done some changing,” he says. “I am much more in touch with me.”
To delineate the beginning of this new era, Mosley changed the name of his upcoming solo album so that it was no longer a continuation of his Shock Value series but the stand-alone Textbook Timbo. Like his previous albums, it features appearances from usual suspects like Jay Z, Justin Timberlake, and Pharrell, and some newer talent like Drake, and—well, that’s sort of it, really. “They have no stars in this generation,” Mosley says. “They have these D.J.’s, techno-whatever, that’s not music. That just goes to show you that drugs is that popular.” He laughs, then stops himself. That was kind of an Old Tim thing to say. “I don’t want to feel like I’m dissing people. Because guess what, they found a way to make a living for theyself. So who am I to dis the next man who know how to make a living for theyself?”
Part 2: New Tim is still the same as the old Tim in lots of ways
New Tim is more thoughtful about what he says, or at least quicker to apologize for saying it, like when he said earlier this year that Chris Brown and Drake’s remixes of deceased songstress Aaliyah’s vocals would never work, because only Timbaland, as her soul mate, could do them. “When I look back, I say, Man, I would feel some kind of way, too,” he says. “I was like, ‘You right, I’m wrong.’ ”
New Tim is still the same as the old Tim in lots of ways. He’s still “a big flirt,” he says. “Women are fascinated by me. I don’t know if my song got them through a rough time with their boyfriend or what, but the look they give me, it’s like they are looking into my soul. I attract that Sex and the City–type woman. Real sophisticated.” He gives me a meaningful look. “My wife, she did an analysis and said that 65 percent of white women love me.” He is still easily distracted. “I was talking to Jay, I said, ‘When did all these white people come to hip-hop?’ We watched it change. That’s how long we have been in the game.”
And prone to digression. “People have changed. Take yourself,” he says. “Like, your whole swagger is not like the typical white girl from back in the day. Go back and watch old interviews from another white woman, and you’ll be like, ‘Oh, God.’ The enunciation of words, the way they sat. It was all so much more sterile. Now, it’s more like, Yo, let me sit with you and talk. And the attraction level in this world today, I’m not attracted to just the same race no more. It’s like, Let me get into this white girl, or Let me date this Indian girl or this Puerto Rican girl. So many beautiful women, you can look past it. And like, your chemistry mixes better. Some countries you go to and people still, like, smell. But that doesn’t happen so much anymore. Now you come home with me, my body odor matches your body odor, and you’ll be like, ‘Wow, you smell so good.’ They used to say white people smelled like wet dog. I haven’t smelled that in about twenty years. Now, back to the music,” he says.
New Tim might be more humble, but he also knows how good he is. “A lot of people have great sounds, but they don’t have great music,” he says. “Have you seen that movie Now You See Me?” he asks. “That mentalist guy, the way he can hypnotize you, that’s me with my music. Like ‘Suit & Tie’ ”—from Justin Timberlake’s album, featuring Jay Z—“is a great masterpiece.”
Should he win a Grammy this year, New Tim knows exactly what he will say: “I’m twelve years a slave. In the music business. I’m the underdog. How many underdogs out there? Fight for what you believe in. Shit will happen. I’m standing up on this podium, as a living witness, to witness that God is always on time. Not on your time. But he knows when you deserve something.”
Mosley has come far, though not as far as he sometimes makes it sound. Which is understandable: When you’ve seen the heights he’s seen, everything else looks like the bottom. He was born in Norfolk, Virginia, a military town on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. From the beginning he showed little interest in anything other than music. “He was the quiet type,” says Missy Elliott, who was invited over to his house one day by a mutual friend, an aspiring rapper named Melvin “Magoo” Barcliff, and went there every day thereafter, the two of them making up rhymes while D.J. Timmy Tim, as he called himself, played a tune on his Casio keyboard, beatboxed with his hands, tapped a pencil, whatever sounded cool. His rhythm was so impressive that after another student at the school, Pharrell Williams, heard him banging out a beat on his desk one day, the two soon joined forces in the group Surrounded by Idiots. The resulting recordings achieved a level of buzz in area high schools that today might be called viral, but this was the eighties, when things took longer. So it was that 15-year-old D.J. Timmy Tim was still working at Red Lobster the night one of his co-workers decided to show off his new gun, which was accidentally discharged. Mosley survived what might be the least gangster shooting in music history—it occurred while he was “washing dishes, no less,” he says with a sigh—but the bullet, which remains lodged in his armpit, damaged nerves that temporarily caused him to lose feeling in his right hand.
New Tim is still the same as the old Tim in lots of ways. He’s still “a big flirt,” he says. “Women are fascinated by me. I don’t know if my song got them through a rough time with their boyfriend or what, but the look they give me, it’s like they are looking into my soul. I attract that Sex and the City–type woman. Real sophisticated.” He gives me a meaningful look. “My wife, she did an analysis and said that 65 percent of white women love me.” He is still easily distracted. “I was talking to Jay, I said, ‘When did all these white people come to hip-hop?’ We watched it change. That’s how long we have been in the game.”
And prone to digression. “People have changed. Take yourself,” he says. “Like, your whole swagger is not like the typical white girl from back in the day. Go back and watch old interviews from another white woman, and you’ll be like, ‘Oh, God.’ The enunciation of words, the way they sat. It was all so much more sterile. Now, it’s more like, Yo, let me sit with you and talk. And the attraction level in this world today, I’m not attracted to just the same race no more. It’s like, Let me get into this white girl, or Let me date this Indian girl or this Puerto Rican girl. So many beautiful women, you can look past it. And like, your chemistry mixes better. Some countries you go to and people still, like, smell. But that doesn’t happen so much anymore. Now you come home with me, my body odor matches your body odor, and you’ll be like, ‘Wow, you smell so good.’ They used to say white people smelled like wet dog. I haven’t smelled that in about twenty years. Now, back to the music,” he says.
New Tim might be more humble, but he also knows how good he is. “A lot of people have great sounds, but they don’t have great music,” he says. “Have you seen that movie Now You See Me?” he asks. “That mentalist guy, the way he can hypnotize you, that’s me with my music. Like ‘Suit & Tie’ ”—from Justin Timberlake’s album, featuring Jay Z—“is a great masterpiece.”
Should he win a Grammy this year, New Tim knows exactly what he will say: “I’m twelve years a slave. In the music business. I’m the underdog. How many underdogs out there? Fight for what you believe in. Shit will happen. I’m standing up on this podium, as a living witness, to witness that God is always on time. Not on your time. But he knows when you deserve something.”
Mosley has come far, though not as far as he sometimes makes it sound. Which is understandable: When you’ve seen the heights he’s seen, everything else looks like the bottom. He was born in Norfolk, Virginia, a military town on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. From the beginning he showed little interest in anything other than music. “He was the quiet type,” says Missy Elliott, who was invited over to his house one day by a mutual friend, an aspiring rapper named Melvin “Magoo” Barcliff, and went there every day thereafter, the two of them making up rhymes while D.J. Timmy Tim, as he called himself, played a tune on his Casio keyboard, beatboxed with his hands, tapped a pencil, whatever sounded cool. His rhythm was so impressive that after another student at the school, Pharrell Williams, heard him banging out a beat on his desk one day, the two soon joined forces in the group Surrounded by Idiots. The resulting recordings achieved a level of buzz in area high schools that today might be called viral, but this was the eighties, when things took longer. So it was that 15-year-old D.J. Timmy Tim was still working at Red Lobster the night one of his co-workers decided to show off his new gun, which was accidentally discharged. Mosley survived what might be the least gangster shooting in music history—it occurred while he was “washing dishes, no less,” he says with a sigh—but the bullet, which remains lodged in his armpit, damaged nerves that temporarily caused him to lose feeling in his right hand.
Part 3: “I was in love with [Aaliyah]”
It took grueling physical therapy to recover, but when he did, Missy Elliott took him and Magoo up to New Jersey, where her band was auditioning for Donald Earle DeGrate Junior, otherwise known as Devante Swing, one of the founding members of the R&B band Jodeci. At first Mosley “sounded horrible,” said Bill Pettaway Jr., a songwriter and session musician who was hanging around the studio at the time, but it was clear he had talent: Enough to join the music-making collective DeGrate was assembling in Rochester. The setup he described sounded utopian, or at least like a pitch for an MTV show: a gang of talented young artists living and working together, writing songs for his label, Swing Mob. But the group, who quickly named themselves Da Bassment Crew, after the basement studios they worked in, found over time that the reality of their condition was more totalitarian. Credit on the albums went to the Swing Mob, not to individuals, which bothered Mosley, as did the fact that DeGrate was amassing a fleet of luxury vehicles while the rest of them were struggling. Pettaway sometimes drove to Rochester just to bring him ramen noodles. “He had no money, nothing,” says Pettaway. “He had one blue-turquoise coat. And he sat by a hot-water heater on the floor on the basement.”
The collective fell apart in 1995, although its members continued to collaborate. Mosley and Static Major produced the oily, now-iconic “Pony” for their cohort Ginuwine, and soon after, Def Jam put Mosley and Elliott together to work on material for Aaliyah Haughton, the teenage siren. “I was in love with her,” Mosley admitted to E! after Aaliyah died in a plane crash in 2001, although this was hardly a surprise to anyone who heard the lilt in his voice when he introduced “Baby Girl, better known as a Aaliyah,” in the 1998 single “Are You That Somebody?” Which was everyone, because that song was huge.
“Are You That Somebody?” is often held up as an example of what is unique about the Timbaland sound, because it combines all the elements that would become his signature: the chunky, unpredictable beat that forces the singer to chase it around, the combination of traditional hip-hop and R&B sounds, which would pave the way for the Rihannas and Nicki Minajs of today, and the weird yet appealingly familiar sample of a cooing baby, plucked from a seventies disco record.
Now, in the digital age, it’s remarkable for how organic it sounds. You can hear actual instruments, guitars and bass and live drums. Mosley still makes most of his beats the old-fashioned way. “I do everything from my mouth,” he says. “Horn sounds, everything.” He also has a vast library of sounds and samples. “The other night, I was watching Oblivion, and I fell asleep, but I woke up when I heard something dope and I’m like, ‘Aww, I got to sample this.’ ” If that fails him, he looks to whatever is handy. People talk about the time when Mosley picked up a chair during the recording of Rihanna’s “Sell Me Candy” and started bashing the window, just to get the sound he wanted.
An omnivorous consumer of music (“I love Metallica,” he says, in Miami), Mosley thought nothing of mixing hip-hop and R&B, or reaching into Egyptian music for a loopy flute for Jay Z’s “Big Pimpin,” or grabbing a beat from bhangra for Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On.” These decisions would sometimes come back to haunt him in the form of the copyright owners, but the result was that no one who heard the music really thought about what genre they were listening to. “There was no category for the music he did,” says Elliott. “People didn’t know what to label it.” This was a pretty big deal in an industry in which urban and pop were still pretty segregated. Timbaland’s songs didn’t so much cross over as obliterate the line. Sure, there were some stinkers. A lot, actually, including most of his releases as a rap duo with Magoo. But Timbaland managed to produce an amazing 49 Top 40 hits between 1996 and 2008. His music embodied the spirit of the early aughts. Bouncy and joyful, it smelled like vanilla body lotion, wore Juicy Couture, thrilled to sexy text messages, and was giddy from the prospect of globalization and the pleasure of “spending cheese.”
His music also sold really, really well, and soon everyone wanted a piece of him. His beats boosted the careers of established artists: “Timbo the king,” became a recurring character in Jay Z’s music. You can hear him battling “2 Many Hoes” on the The Blueprint 2 (it’s a perennial problem); brushing the dirt off his shoulder on The Black Album; and providing “that hop I’m talking ’bout right here, Timbo” on so many others. And they made stars: In 2002, former boy-bander Justin Timberlake walked into Timbaland’s studio upset about breaking up with his fellow Mouseketeer Britney Spears and walked out with “Cry Me a River,” an epic, Gregorian-chant-infused revenge ballad that launched his career as a solo artist.
“He has an amazing sensibility,” says Nelly Furtado, who might have been the “I’m Like a Bird” girl forever had her label not hired Mosley to work on her 2006 album, Loose. “He has good taste, and he makes good choices.”
The collective fell apart in 1995, although its members continued to collaborate. Mosley and Static Major produced the oily, now-iconic “Pony” for their cohort Ginuwine, and soon after, Def Jam put Mosley and Elliott together to work on material for Aaliyah Haughton, the teenage siren. “I was in love with her,” Mosley admitted to E! after Aaliyah died in a plane crash in 2001, although this was hardly a surprise to anyone who heard the lilt in his voice when he introduced “Baby Girl, better known as a Aaliyah,” in the 1998 single “Are You That Somebody?” Which was everyone, because that song was huge.
“Are You That Somebody?” is often held up as an example of what is unique about the Timbaland sound, because it combines all the elements that would become his signature: the chunky, unpredictable beat that forces the singer to chase it around, the combination of traditional hip-hop and R&B sounds, which would pave the way for the Rihannas and Nicki Minajs of today, and the weird yet appealingly familiar sample of a cooing baby, plucked from a seventies disco record.
Now, in the digital age, it’s remarkable for how organic it sounds. You can hear actual instruments, guitars and bass and live drums. Mosley still makes most of his beats the old-fashioned way. “I do everything from my mouth,” he says. “Horn sounds, everything.” He also has a vast library of sounds and samples. “The other night, I was watching Oblivion, and I fell asleep, but I woke up when I heard something dope and I’m like, ‘Aww, I got to sample this.’ ” If that fails him, he looks to whatever is handy. People talk about the time when Mosley picked up a chair during the recording of Rihanna’s “Sell Me Candy” and started bashing the window, just to get the sound he wanted.
An omnivorous consumer of music (“I love Metallica,” he says, in Miami), Mosley thought nothing of mixing hip-hop and R&B, or reaching into Egyptian music for a loopy flute for Jay Z’s “Big Pimpin,” or grabbing a beat from bhangra for Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On.” These decisions would sometimes come back to haunt him in the form of the copyright owners, but the result was that no one who heard the music really thought about what genre they were listening to. “There was no category for the music he did,” says Elliott. “People didn’t know what to label it.” This was a pretty big deal in an industry in which urban and pop were still pretty segregated. Timbaland’s songs didn’t so much cross over as obliterate the line. Sure, there were some stinkers. A lot, actually, including most of his releases as a rap duo with Magoo. But Timbaland managed to produce an amazing 49 Top 40 hits between 1996 and 2008. His music embodied the spirit of the early aughts. Bouncy and joyful, it smelled like vanilla body lotion, wore Juicy Couture, thrilled to sexy text messages, and was giddy from the prospect of globalization and the pleasure of “spending cheese.”
His music also sold really, really well, and soon everyone wanted a piece of him. His beats boosted the careers of established artists: “Timbo the king,” became a recurring character in Jay Z’s music. You can hear him battling “2 Many Hoes” on the The Blueprint 2 (it’s a perennial problem); brushing the dirt off his shoulder on The Black Album; and providing “that hop I’m talking ’bout right here, Timbo” on so many others. And they made stars: In 2002, former boy-bander Justin Timberlake walked into Timbaland’s studio upset about breaking up with his fellow Mouseketeer Britney Spears and walked out with “Cry Me a River,” an epic, Gregorian-chant-infused revenge ballad that launched his career as a solo artist.
“He has an amazing sensibility,” says Nelly Furtado, who might have been the “I’m Like a Bird” girl forever had her label not hired Mosley to work on her 2006 album, Loose. “He has good taste, and he makes good choices.”
Part 4: Why he wasn’t always easy to work with
He wasn’t always easy to work with. Mosley was becoming a star himself at the point when he began working with Furtado, and the pressure was intense. “It was always challenging to work with him, like, ‘You gotta hit a home run!’ ” He worked like he was still in the basement, hustling for a break. “He lived in this tiny little tour bus outside the studio, and he’d be in there until 1 a.m.,” she says. “Then he’d go out to a club until 6 a.m.,” not to party so much as to see what kinds of sounds were getting people excited. “Then he’d go back to the studio. He’s making a product for a consumer that needs it. He’s very aware, at an intrinsic level, of that fact that people want to lose themselves.”
Maybe because he felt the same way. “He’s kind of socially awkward, to be honest,” says Furtado. “He’s distracted a lot of the time, and fidgety.” Like a lot of geniuses, Mosley is equal parts self-loathing and self-aggrandizing. He isn’t the kind of producer who likes to stay behind the scenes. He’d insert his gruff voice into other people’s songs—that’s him urging Justin Timberlake to “get your sexy on,” in “SexyBack.” Although he’d had little success with music under his own name, he wasn’t prepared to give it up. During the making of Loose, he was putting together Shock Value, his first solo album since becoming a famous, big-time producer, and he’d become preoccupied with his own image. “He was kind of coming to terms who he was,” says Furtado. “He wasn’t, like, slick like Pharrell, or mysterious like Dr. Dre; he was Timbaland, the chubby guy in the corner.”
“Image is everything,” he told a reporter, of his decision to lose 100 pounds on a strict diet and exercise program. But for every pound he lost, his ego seemed to expand. Furtado describes their relationship during the making of Loose as “volatile.” One of their fights was over the song “Promiscuous.” Furtado thought the lyrics—a flirty back-and-forth between a man and a woman—were dumb, and the listener does get the sense their attraction is not based on intelligence. But neither are most people’s. Mosley won the argument, and “Promiscuous” hit No. 1 in the summer of 2006 and became an anthem for hookup culture. But although they toured together to promote it, “we actually stopped talking for a while,” she says.
The success of Shock Value, which went platinum, only stoked Mosley’s ego further. Eventually, he alienated Jay Z, too. During the making of 2009’s The Blueprint 3, Mosley was elusive, repeatedly turning down or blowing off recording sessions. Then the tracks he had worked on started leaking. This drove Jay Z, who is fanatical about when and how his music is released, crazy. “It just ruined the entire thing,” Jay Z complained to the BBC. “It seemed like it was more about him than the actual album.”
Although he had bristled at not being credited for his contributions to Swing Mob, Mosley was doing the same thing to the producers who worked under him, according to a co-producer, Scott Storch, who publicly accused him of usurping his credit on “Cry Me a River” and of regularly giving his right-hand man, Danja, a.k.a. Nate Hills, the shaft on hits that he was responsible for, like Madonna’s “4 Minutes.” Hills never admitted there was a problem, and Mosley denied it, but “4 Minutes” was the last track they worked on together before Danja struck out on his own.
New Tim looks back on this period with regret. “I was feeling myself a little too much,” he says. His attitude, he says, was rooted in insecurity. “When you from the streets, you just don’t want to get close to people,” he says. “You’re in a different world that you just aren’t used to. Like, ‘I’m cool, get away from me.’ ”
Furtado chalks it up to growing pains. “He’d been through this remarkable physical transformation, and people wanted to know about him. It’s hard for anybody to go through that,” she says. “There’s a lot of pressure to live up to that, there’s pressure to spend money, to live this larger-than-life existence.”
Which he was by all means doing. After he got money, Mosley told E! in his True Hollywood Story, “I became high-maintenance just like that.” He was amassing jewelry, real estate, and a fleet of vehicles that put Devante Swing’s to shame. “He’d buy a car and drive it a week and say, ‘Oh, you can have it,’ ” says Pettaway. “He don’t care. I wrecked one of his Bentleys, he didn’t care.”
Pettaway was with him in the Bahamas when he met Monique Idlett, a marketing executive who bowled him over with her resemblance to Aliyah. “I thought I saw a ghost,” he said later. He rented a private island for their wedding, which was covered by InStyle.
Maybe because he felt the same way. “He’s kind of socially awkward, to be honest,” says Furtado. “He’s distracted a lot of the time, and fidgety.” Like a lot of geniuses, Mosley is equal parts self-loathing and self-aggrandizing. He isn’t the kind of producer who likes to stay behind the scenes. He’d insert his gruff voice into other people’s songs—that’s him urging Justin Timberlake to “get your sexy on,” in “SexyBack.” Although he’d had little success with music under his own name, he wasn’t prepared to give it up. During the making of Loose, he was putting together Shock Value, his first solo album since becoming a famous, big-time producer, and he’d become preoccupied with his own image. “He was kind of coming to terms who he was,” says Furtado. “He wasn’t, like, slick like Pharrell, or mysterious like Dr. Dre; he was Timbaland, the chubby guy in the corner.”
“Image is everything,” he told a reporter, of his decision to lose 100 pounds on a strict diet and exercise program. But for every pound he lost, his ego seemed to expand. Furtado describes their relationship during the making of Loose as “volatile.” One of their fights was over the song “Promiscuous.” Furtado thought the lyrics—a flirty back-and-forth between a man and a woman—were dumb, and the listener does get the sense their attraction is not based on intelligence. But neither are most people’s. Mosley won the argument, and “Promiscuous” hit No. 1 in the summer of 2006 and became an anthem for hookup culture. But although they toured together to promote it, “we actually stopped talking for a while,” she says.
The success of Shock Value, which went platinum, only stoked Mosley’s ego further. Eventually, he alienated Jay Z, too. During the making of 2009’s The Blueprint 3, Mosley was elusive, repeatedly turning down or blowing off recording sessions. Then the tracks he had worked on started leaking. This drove Jay Z, who is fanatical about when and how his music is released, crazy. “It just ruined the entire thing,” Jay Z complained to the BBC. “It seemed like it was more about him than the actual album.”
Although he had bristled at not being credited for his contributions to Swing Mob, Mosley was doing the same thing to the producers who worked under him, according to a co-producer, Scott Storch, who publicly accused him of usurping his credit on “Cry Me a River” and of regularly giving his right-hand man, Danja, a.k.a. Nate Hills, the shaft on hits that he was responsible for, like Madonna’s “4 Minutes.” Hills never admitted there was a problem, and Mosley denied it, but “4 Minutes” was the last track they worked on together before Danja struck out on his own.
New Tim looks back on this period with regret. “I was feeling myself a little too much,” he says. His attitude, he says, was rooted in insecurity. “When you from the streets, you just don’t want to get close to people,” he says. “You’re in a different world that you just aren’t used to. Like, ‘I’m cool, get away from me.’ ”
Furtado chalks it up to growing pains. “He’d been through this remarkable physical transformation, and people wanted to know about him. It’s hard for anybody to go through that,” she says. “There’s a lot of pressure to live up to that, there’s pressure to spend money, to live this larger-than-life existence.”
Which he was by all means doing. After he got money, Mosley told E! in his True Hollywood Story, “I became high-maintenance just like that.” He was amassing jewelry, real estate, and a fleet of vehicles that put Devante Swing’s to shame. “He’d buy a car and drive it a week and say, ‘Oh, you can have it,’ ” says Pettaway. “He don’t care. I wrecked one of his Bentleys, he didn’t care.”
Pettaway was with him in the Bahamas when he met Monique Idlett, a marketing executive who bowled him over with her resemblance to Aliyah. “I thought I saw a ghost,” he said later. He rented a private island for their wedding, which was covered by InStyle.
Part 5: “Timbaland knows the way to reach the top of the chart”
In retrospect, this was a last big hurrah. It was June 2008, a few months before the financial markets crashed, laying waste to the economy and every vulnerable thing in it, including the record industry and the mood for anything flashy or expensive.
Like everyone else, Mosley was way overextended. He’d been indiscriminate about who he worked with and let record companies, desperate for hits in a dying market, throw him together with anyone who might stick: Ashlee Simpson. The Jonas Brothers. New Kids on the freaking Block. The music sounded wrong in the new, less buoyant atmosphere, and it wasn’t long before the Timbaland-beat-as-panacea became a kind of industry joke. “Timbaland knows the way to reach the top of the chart,” Weezer jeered in a 2008 song. “Maybe if I work with him I can perfect the art.”
Even for those who wanted them, few people could afford “Timbo on the track, 250 for the beat,” as Jay Z put it in a song cut from The Blueprint 3. Maybe he could, but they remained estranged. Maybe Timberlake could, but he was busy with his movie career.
As for Mosley, he was far from diversified.“The thing about Tim is that his fortune hasn’t been made from clothing lines or fragrances,” says Nelly Furtado. “It’s all been from music.”
Mosley went from working with everyone to working with no one. Occasionally he resurfaced in sad tabloid stories. In 2010, creditors threatened to foreclose on his condo in Miami. The same year, he filed a $1.8 million insurance claim for a watch he claimed had been stolen. Shortly after, Idlett’s mother phoned 911 after Mosley drove off, then texted to say he was “tired of the stress.” “He’s by a cliff in the canyon,” she told the dispatcher.
Back at the Setai, Mosley dismisses the incident with a wave of his hand. “Ain’t no damn cliffs,” he scoffs. “I just took a drive to Starbucks.” He was upset about the loss of the watch, he says, and just wanted some alone time. “Everyone thought I was going off the deep end or something.”
Typical, according to Missy Elliott: “So as long as I’ve known him, since high school, I’ve never seen him cry.”
He does admit that at the time, he went through a period of being addicted to painkillers. “When I got shot, I had pain medicine. I start abusing then,” he says. He’d picked the habit up again when he started lifting weights, which aggravated his injury. I ask him why he decided to start talking about it now. (He’d recently given an interview to Revolt TV about the subject.) “So people know I’m not perfect,” he says, sounding surprised.
“I think he was overwhelmed,” says Jerome “J-Roc” Harmon, the producer that replaced Danja as Mosley’s right hand. “He had a lot of obligations, a new family. He had a best friend, they weren’t friends anymore. Maybe it all hit him at once.”
Not long after, Mosely apologized to Jay Z. A mutual friend says Mosley’s wife pushed him to do it. He says it was more like an epiphany. “I’m very religious so I’m gonna put it in this terms: God done work on me,” he says. “That’s the best way I can put it. God did a lot of work on me, and when I looked in the mirror I saw a different person. I did some changing, and the first person I apologized to was Jay.”
To do so he recorded a song, “Sorry”: “I missed your 40th, and that hurt me so deep / Accept my apology, my apology, nigga, please.” Then he flew to New York, where Jay Z was performing with Kanye West. “As soon as we saw each other, we were okay,” he says.
Mosley and Idlett have decided to get a divorce, but he and Jay were back together. Soon they were working on Magna Carta Holy Grail. It was an idea Jay Z had had for a long time, but now the time seemed right. Timberlake was ready for a new album, too. “Justin and Jay, they are my brothers,” Mosley says. This time, they agreed, the tone of their work needed to be different. “More mature,” he says. More perspective was needed. “The hip-hop community needs to stop talking about all this money that we really don’t have,” he says now. “Man, the world is in trouble. Taxes. Europe is in financial debt. We got great jobs, but we like, everybody not gonna have the money that me, Jay, and Justin got. It ain’t happening.” New Tim was more magnanimous about sharing credit. “Like [Magna Carta’s] ‘Fuckwithmeyouknowigotit,’” he says. “That’s Boi 1-da that did that track,” he says, referring to a young producer from Toronto. Those “old-new keyboards that sound like Sanford and Son” on “Suit & Tie”? That was J-Roc. “It takes a big man to say, ‘I didn’t do that,’ ” he points out. Around the same time, he apologized to Furtado. “He talked a lot about how much he had changed, he’s more mature, he’s a father, he kind of figured it out. The way people do.”
Not all the critics picked up on the album’s nuances: The New York Times called The 20/20 Experience a “paean to brand maintenance,” and Rolling Stone dismissed the production of Magna Carta as “woozy and grand—another luxury possession.” The world is a more cynical place when it comes to the work product of multimillionaires.
Magna Carta Holy Grail and The 20/20 Experience Part 1 sold 1 million and 2.3 million copies, respectively—but records are never going to sell like they used to, so Mosley is exploring other career options. Last summer, he joined Jay Z’s management company, Roc Nation, as a client. “I’m too great, and I’m not capturing all my greatness,” he said he realized. “I’m holding myself back.”
The company, he hopes, will help him grow his brand beyond the traditional channels, connecting him with start-ups and technology companies that need musical content, among other things. This spring, he’ll curate a series of music festivals for a South African beer company and teach a class in London on beat-making. In November, Mosley was one of several celebrity ambassadors to appear at a party for Frigo, a line of Swedish underwear for men. Mosley looked ill at ease when he showed up at the pop-up shop in the meatpacking district, posing for photos next to Derek Jeter and Carmelo Anthony in his tight-fitting floral blazer, but within twenty minutes, he was smiling contentedly in a circle of girls. Sex and the City types, just like he said.
What can he do? Women are fascinated by him. There’s only one that holds his interest. “What I say is this: Music is my girl,” he says. “She’s not faithful to me. But she’s faithful just enough.” Which is why he’ll always come back.
Like everyone else, Mosley was way overextended. He’d been indiscriminate about who he worked with and let record companies, desperate for hits in a dying market, throw him together with anyone who might stick: Ashlee Simpson. The Jonas Brothers. New Kids on the freaking Block. The music sounded wrong in the new, less buoyant atmosphere, and it wasn’t long before the Timbaland-beat-as-panacea became a kind of industry joke. “Timbaland knows the way to reach the top of the chart,” Weezer jeered in a 2008 song. “Maybe if I work with him I can perfect the art.”
Even for those who wanted them, few people could afford “Timbo on the track, 250 for the beat,” as Jay Z put it in a song cut from The Blueprint 3. Maybe he could, but they remained estranged. Maybe Timberlake could, but he was busy with his movie career.
As for Mosley, he was far from diversified.“The thing about Tim is that his fortune hasn’t been made from clothing lines or fragrances,” says Nelly Furtado. “It’s all been from music.”
Mosley went from working with everyone to working with no one. Occasionally he resurfaced in sad tabloid stories. In 2010, creditors threatened to foreclose on his condo in Miami. The same year, he filed a $1.8 million insurance claim for a watch he claimed had been stolen. Shortly after, Idlett’s mother phoned 911 after Mosley drove off, then texted to say he was “tired of the stress.” “He’s by a cliff in the canyon,” she told the dispatcher.
Back at the Setai, Mosley dismisses the incident with a wave of his hand. “Ain’t no damn cliffs,” he scoffs. “I just took a drive to Starbucks.” He was upset about the loss of the watch, he says, and just wanted some alone time. “Everyone thought I was going off the deep end or something.”
Typical, according to Missy Elliott: “So as long as I’ve known him, since high school, I’ve never seen him cry.”
He does admit that at the time, he went through a period of being addicted to painkillers. “When I got shot, I had pain medicine. I start abusing then,” he says. He’d picked the habit up again when he started lifting weights, which aggravated his injury. I ask him why he decided to start talking about it now. (He’d recently given an interview to Revolt TV about the subject.) “So people know I’m not perfect,” he says, sounding surprised.
“I think he was overwhelmed,” says Jerome “J-Roc” Harmon, the producer that replaced Danja as Mosley’s right hand. “He had a lot of obligations, a new family. He had a best friend, they weren’t friends anymore. Maybe it all hit him at once.”
Not long after, Mosely apologized to Jay Z. A mutual friend says Mosley’s wife pushed him to do it. He says it was more like an epiphany. “I’m very religious so I’m gonna put it in this terms: God done work on me,” he says. “That’s the best way I can put it. God did a lot of work on me, and when I looked in the mirror I saw a different person. I did some changing, and the first person I apologized to was Jay.”
To do so he recorded a song, “Sorry”: “I missed your 40th, and that hurt me so deep / Accept my apology, my apology, nigga, please.” Then he flew to New York, where Jay Z was performing with Kanye West. “As soon as we saw each other, we were okay,” he says.
Mosley and Idlett have decided to get a divorce, but he and Jay were back together. Soon they were working on Magna Carta Holy Grail. It was an idea Jay Z had had for a long time, but now the time seemed right. Timberlake was ready for a new album, too. “Justin and Jay, they are my brothers,” Mosley says. This time, they agreed, the tone of their work needed to be different. “More mature,” he says. More perspective was needed. “The hip-hop community needs to stop talking about all this money that we really don’t have,” he says now. “Man, the world is in trouble. Taxes. Europe is in financial debt. We got great jobs, but we like, everybody not gonna have the money that me, Jay, and Justin got. It ain’t happening.” New Tim was more magnanimous about sharing credit. “Like [Magna Carta’s] ‘Fuckwithmeyouknowigotit,’” he says. “That’s Boi 1-da that did that track,” he says, referring to a young producer from Toronto. Those “old-new keyboards that sound like Sanford and Son” on “Suit & Tie”? That was J-Roc. “It takes a big man to say, ‘I didn’t do that,’ ” he points out. Around the same time, he apologized to Furtado. “He talked a lot about how much he had changed, he’s more mature, he’s a father, he kind of figured it out. The way people do.”
Not all the critics picked up on the album’s nuances: The New York Times called The 20/20 Experience a “paean to brand maintenance,” and Rolling Stone dismissed the production of Magna Carta as “woozy and grand—another luxury possession.” The world is a more cynical place when it comes to the work product of multimillionaires.
Magna Carta Holy Grail and The 20/20 Experience Part 1 sold 1 million and 2.3 million copies, respectively—but records are never going to sell like they used to, so Mosley is exploring other career options. Last summer, he joined Jay Z’s management company, Roc Nation, as a client. “I’m too great, and I’m not capturing all my greatness,” he said he realized. “I’m holding myself back.”
The company, he hopes, will help him grow his brand beyond the traditional channels, connecting him with start-ups and technology companies that need musical content, among other things. This spring, he’ll curate a series of music festivals for a South African beer company and teach a class in London on beat-making. In November, Mosley was one of several celebrity ambassadors to appear at a party for Frigo, a line of Swedish underwear for men. Mosley looked ill at ease when he showed up at the pop-up shop in the meatpacking district, posing for photos next to Derek Jeter and Carmelo Anthony in his tight-fitting floral blazer, but within twenty minutes, he was smiling contentedly in a circle of girls. Sex and the City types, just like he said.
What can he do? Women are fascinated by him. There’s only one that holds his interest. “What I say is this: Music is my girl,” he says. “She’s not faithful to me. But she’s faithful just enough.” Which is why he’ll always come back.
Timbaland shooting new music video with Justin Timberlake & Pharrell Williams
With Textbook Timbo on its way with confirmation by Timbaland that the album is in its mixing stages,
in mixin mode 4 my album "text book timbo" its going 2 be dope!
— Timbaland (@Timbaland) December 4, 2013
footage of a music video shooting featuring Timbaland, Justin Timberlake and Pharrell are in the works. Some of you may find this song familiar as it was premiered last year at the SXSW show in Texas. In that preview the single featured Snoop Dogg, i guess we will have to wait to see if Snoop actually makes an appearance on the track or if it has been reworked since then but for now enjoy this little preview.
For the single preview from SXSW scroll to around the 20 minute mark.
Conor Maynard confirms Timbaland on new album
Update your discographies everyone, you can now add Conor Maynard to your list of artists that have worked with Timbaland for material for their own albums. Perhaps Pharrell introduced him? Point of the matter is as of yet unnamed, Timbo will be on the album, which will include tracks with Labrinth and Travie McCoy.
Don't believe us? Here listen:
Jennifer Hudson talks new music
Timbaland and Pharrell have been having their plates full all year! What with Williams involved in the Robin Thicke movement and Mosley with the Justin Timberlake regime...
Now both VA producers are involved once again the upcoming third album project with Jennifer Hudson! Ok calm down, we only know so far they are working on the album, but other producers like Babyface and RedOne are on it too.
The album is planned to have a 70s theme to it, which for us Timstans will be interesting to watch fold out as Tim is big in to the 80s, let's see if he can pull this one off!
Jay-Z Feat. Nas, Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé, Swizz Beatz, Pharrell, Timbaland - "BBC"
YIKES! This one pretty epic song to have so many people featured on it, I got a feeling though there's more lyrics to it than just this unless the rhythm is laid out in such a way that there is no need for much lyrics at all, let's just hope the Timbo/Beatz production work is up to scratch.
Any guesses on what "BBC"? stands for? (No not "British Broadcasting Corporation") I believe it stands for "Billionaire Boys Club", I remember him rapping that term somewhere? Can't remember the song.
There's been also numerous adverts for "Magna Carter Holy Grail" with Timbaland in them, we'd be here forever watching them, so instead here's one with what I assume could be "BBC" or otherwise be the bonus track on the album "Holy Grail" with Justin Timberlake:
Jay-Z - "Magna Carta Holy Grail"
Alright alright, here you go, I'll cut to the chase: Rick Rubin, Jay-Z, Timbaland, Pharrell and Swizz Beatz working on Hova's new album... Make sure to keep checking on www.magnacartaholygrail.com
Robin Thicke - "Take It Easy On Me"
Well by now most of us have correctly guessed that Timbaland is copping production on Robin Thicke's next album "Blurred Lines" in the form of "Take It Easy On Me" so what I'm gonna do is delve down the degrees of confirmation.
First off, the song pretty much follows the flow that Pharrell did on the title track, both in melody, rhythm, and lyrics, if you need a reminder then watch/listen to this: (NSFW)
Robin Thicke 'Blurred Lines' (Dirty Version) from OB MANAGEMENT on Vimeo.
Secondly, it's not uncommon of Tim to premiere a demo of a song live like he did this one, he's done it before with "Hold Your Breath", I don't think I need to remind you who (disgustingly) landed up with that one in the end. Here's a reminder of the live version.
And third and lastly: well this is probably got nothing to do with it, but they both are on Interscope Records, so a collabo had to come, but more importantly you can click here for a forum thread which has had the privilege of listening and and reviewing the album exclusively.
Justin Timberlake in Austin: The New MySpace Exclusive Interview
I know I've been away for ages on the Timberlake project, let me make it up to you by sharing with you the most massive interview I've put up here yet! I would summarize it but frankly, we'll be here all night already! You all better get a drink, this is gonna take a while...
Justin Timberlake: Forgive me, man, I’m sick, jet-legged I got the flu around Grammy weekend, and then we had to go on a promo trip and I’ve just been fighting off exhaustion for like, ever.
Ah, man. That sounds super rough.
It’s a little tough. I’m a little older than I used to be. I don’t bounce back as easily.
None of us do. Busy week. How has the run been so far?
It’s been cool. For the most part, I’ve just been head down, burrowing through, because I’ve just been fighting being sick. It’s fun again. I can tell you that. Like for sure it’s fun again. I can’t remember the last time I got to play a venue this small. [So] that’s exciting. I like doing stuff like that. So, yeah, I’m really having fun with it again. I think that’s probably why I wait [between albums] because the actual schedule can beat you down so much you really do have to take a break from it.
It seems incredibly demanding, physically.
It’s not really the actual shows, it’s just the travel in between. Ask any pro athlete, too. It’s not the games, it’s having to get on the bus, the plane—that’s the stuff that kills you.
I actually saw you play in L.A., after the Grammys.
Oh, cool. At the Palladium. That was our first live gig as a band.
You had done the party in New Orleans during Super Bowl weekend.
To me, that doesn’t count. That’s like a party. That’s a function.
Sure.
Although Paul McCartney was at that show so that did make me nervous and excited at the same time. But I heard he was standing on a table dancing the whole time.
That’s one of the takeaways I had from the L.A. show. People were asking me how it was, and I told them it makes you want to dance.
Oh, good. You know, honestly, that’s what hit me when I started listening to the songs that I put together for this record. I said [to myself], you know, these are going to be a lot of songs that are going to be fun to play live. It’s a soulful set. It’s reminiscent of all the music I loved when I was a kid.
I really just want to keep it simple. I don’t want a lot of hullabaloo around the music. I just want to go and, like, rip everybody’s face off with some great musicians. And so we just started scouting the best musicians we could find and we found a lot of ’em that grew up in the church, which was so appropriate for the stuff that I wrote for this album. They’re killer. And they make me sound way better than I am. [Laughs] And they’re a great group of people, too, so we have a lot of fun together on stage. I guess that’s where the idea came from—JT and the Tennessee Kids. It felt like a band, and it’s been fun.
I was struck by how tight you guys were at the show. It’s a big band.
You don’t see a lot of sets played like that. Well you do, [and] they’re called the Roots. [Laughs] And that’s what I really wanted to do this time around—I wanted the music to really translate live. You play a song like “SexyBack” or “My Love” or songs from even the first record, there’s certain elements that have those synth elements that have to be put into it, and for me, I just wanted to kind of get away from that a little bit on this record and so it really does translate live. It’s a lot of fun to play.
Watching the show, I was wondering how long you had even been putting it together.
We probably rehearsed as a unit for a couple of weeks?
Well, kudos to you guys. They’re obviously pros.
Yeah, that’s why they’re there. Couple of them had to help me relearn songs from my first record. You know, you write all of these songs… And I had been finishing the mixing of the album when they went in to start rehearsing, so then when I showed up, I was going back and forth from the mastering of the album and everything. So I’m listening to all this new stuff and I’m going back and going, wait, what are the lyrics to “Señorita?” So it was a lot to kind of put together at the same time.
How have you felt about the response of the album so far?
Honestly, I don’t read reviews all that much, but you hear through your team and everything, Oh, this person liked the record, this person didn’t care for the record, but for the most part, I’m hearing that people appreciate that I did something different. That there was a different approach, and I think that if you have the platform, and you actually do come up with something different, then it’d be a shame not to put it out. But it’s not like that was the effort. I didn’t write these songs like, We need to make this sound different from the first album or the second album. These are just the songs that we did. There wasn’t that much thought put into it.
[Saturday Night Live creator] Lorne Michaels said something to me that was very valuable, like the second or third time I hosted SNL. Something happened, I can’t remember what it was, but something didn’t work in the dress rehearsal and so I adlibbed something else [on-air] and the joke went over to thunderous applause, not just laughter. So I was talking to him at the after party and he’s like, “Look, we don’t go live every Saturday night because we have a great show. We go live because 11:30 rolls around and we have to put something on the air.” And so for this [album], I waited long enough, obviously. That’s an understatement, but I feel like I would have taken the break regardless of any other involvement with Myspace or any roles I may have been lucky enough to have in movies, or I probably would have waited this long again, just because you want to be this excited about it. If you’re going to get sick over it, you know touring, doing the promo for it and having to talk about it, make sure you’re excited about it.
But I guess the point I was making was I wasn’t trying to do something different. These songs just started lengthening themselves and I just thought, when vinyl was the only way you could get music, the songs faded out because there wasn’t enough available space. You know? They wrote songs [and] arrangements were six, seven minutes. They just cut them off. Vinyl was the only way you could get music and there was only so much available data, there was only so much available space on a vinyl so they would fade songs out, but when you don’t have to do that, I just felt like these songs would transform themselves into something else. And I thought this is something really special. And then when I started sequencing the album, I still said, You know what? Maybe I’ll cut some of these songs down. Maybe some of these interludes don’t make sense. But each piece of the song didn’t even feel like an interlude, you know? As I went in to start mixing it—you arrange while you mix—I’m pulling pieces out and putting pieces back in as the chorus for the second part of the song is coming in, and I’m going, Why would I cut this? This is the right half to the left half, or the left half to the right half, you know? And so as it started to lengthen itself, it just felt appropriate to me. I just loved the way it sounded and the way sonically, each song crept into the next, but I guess what I’m hearing is people are digging that it’s different.
Yeah, it’s awesome.
Cool. Thanks, dude. It’s ambitious, for sure, but I guess you wait six or seven years, you do something, you know? I think for instance, “Suit & Tie” makes a lot more sense to people now when they listen to it in succession [on] the album. Actually people have said that to me. Friends of mine have said that to me, they’re like, I like the song, but hearing it after ‘Pusher Love Girl’ and before ‘Don’t Hold the Wall,’ I get what you’re doing.
When you think about the legacy of FutureSex/LoveSounds, what do you think? Do you think about that at all?
I don’t know, man. Artists tend to dwell on everything negative, and I become a victim of that all the time. And you have to understand, to me, I find it hilarious that people would even associate the word “legacy” with FutureSex/LoveSounds because when I put it out, everybody was laughing at me—critics, radio programmers and to their credit, I understand why. But I wanted to do something different at that time. I wanted to do something that was like, This is like nothing I hear on the radio. That was my effort with that one. I got like terrible reviews on that record, and so to talk about it now… I just think that Tim and I were onto something different and I just think that anytime you put out something different, it’s polarizing. And polarizing is good, I think, because polarizing starts a conversation. I don’t think we appoint ourselves those roles, by any means. We just kind of go into the studio and we don’t even really talk about it. We start messing around with stuff and like, sometimes he’ll come in the studio and he’ll leave his keyboard on and I’m banging out a beat on his keyboard, and he’s like, “Oh, I like what you just did with that, but what if you flip it here?” And then I’ll go over to the keys, and I’ll say, Oh, I like the way you were hitting that beat. It makes me want to play the progression on this rhythm, and then the next thing you know, you start writing a song. I feel like if we actually had rhyme or reason to what we were doing, it would fuck it all up. [Laughs] You know what I mean?
We’re so free in the studio. Timbaland and I have consistently worked together for so long and we keep coming back to each other every time I do a record and every time he does a record, you know? I A&R a lot of his records. He’ll send ’em to me and go, what do you think of this? We just have that relationship. We just go in with a blind eye to the whole thing, which is funny because the album is called The 20/20 Experience.
I want people to close their eyes and listen to this album. I really do think my effort with the last album was to make people dance, and I think with this album, I wrote a lot of songs that make me want to sing.
Oh, yeah?
And dance.
Sure.
“SexyBack” is a song that you don’t sing—you just shout it. You know what I mean? But that’s what it’s for. I wrote that song because I wanted everyone to feel the same way I did when I was just shouting it in the studio. But these songs, I feel like the melodies are a lot more thoughtful and I took my time with it. And the more I find that I take my time with things, the quicker they come. So…
Can you talk a bit about the Jay-Z relationship and the tour and everything?
Yeah, Jay-Z and I have known each other for a while. Always had a great relationship. And Tim and I were in the studio working on some stuff—some potential stuff—for Beyoncé, and Jay came in and we started messing around with stuff, and we worked on a handful of songs together. It would be fun to find a way to put them out.
But, we just kind of have that… what’s the word I’m looking for? I think we’re just kinda the same type of guy. He’s very relaxed. Easy-going. “Suit & Tie” came out of that—we were just having fun. We had an extra room in the studio in New York, and I said, I want to do a dance record, but not like a 120 bpm dance record. I want to do like a Marvin Gaye “Gotta Give It Up,” Curtis Mayfield, “Move On Up.”
And I was talking to Tim about it, and we started messing around with the track and it turned into that, and then Jay came in and was like, What is this? And then we found the little trap thing where Tim took the beat and played it halftime and found the trap to it and Jay was like, “If you don’t use that on the song, I’d like to take that and make a whole song out of it.”
Oh, yeah?
So I was like, Well, do a verse! And then it just was like, 20 minutes later, he’s got the whole thing done.
And then the tour.
Yeah, well, Jay approached me about it because I think the opportunity was coming up for him. I think he likes to do things for his fanbase that are special, as do I, and we just thought, we share the same producers [in] Pharrell and Chad [Hugo] and Tim. We share a lot of the same style, actually. I bet we share a lot of the same fans, you know what I mean? So it just became this idea, and we just started pitching the idea around and I just said, Yeah, man, I like that. I like that. That could be fun. And I remembered artists like Billy [Joel] and Elton [John] went on tour together and you just see them mash up their songs together, and I said, That’s what it has to be. We have to just go out on stage for two hours and just nonstop, kill it and then go have a beer or whatever.
Sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun.
We still haven’t put the show together, but it’s gonna be a lot of fun. It’s going to be a musical show. We’re both on this thing where we’re not into a lot of tricks. We just want to come play and like I said, fry everybody’s face off with the songs and everybody have a great time. Almost festival style, you know?
Sounds great. The new album’s super trippy, I think.
Oh, thanks, man.
Was that something you were shooting for? Like there are spots of it that just get, like…
Trippy. Yeah.
Well, I’m a big Nigel Godrich fan and I’m a big Radiohead fan and I don’t think I’ll ever be brave enough to fully go where those guys [go]. I don’t think I’m capable of it. [Laughs] But there’s some sounds on “Strawberry Bubblegum” and there’s some sounds on “Blue Ocean Floor” and things like that, where they remind me not of them, because I think it would be sacrilegious to compare anybody to them, but remind me of the same feeling I get sometimes when I listen to In Rainbows or Kid A or OK Computer or even The Bends sometimes—just the ambient guitar that Jonny Greenwood does so well. I don’t know. I think it does go trippy. It’s definitely appropriate for many different occasions [laughs].
Right.
It’s also a nice headphone record. We really worked hard mixing it and went back and listened to it on headphones. All those records that I wanted to be able to play and lay down or just sit and play all the way through on headphones, and like you said, just like trip out a bit, you know? So I don’t know that there was a specific influence that made that happen other than our own substance abuse while we were making it [laughs], but yeah, there’s some trippy moments on there, for sure.
First South By show.
First South By show! I’m very excited.
Does it mean anything different to you?
I have not been able to do the festival circuit yet. So for me, it’s my first big festival show, and I’m kind of excited that it’s such an intimate thing because I think it will be a special evening for me and the fans [and] everybody who’s in the room. At least I hope so. I mean, I can’t remember the last time I played to 1,000 people, so I’m really excited to do it.
I saw Radiohead play a benefit at a theater for Haiti relief in a theater in L.A. and there were probably only like, 1,800 people there and it was like, one of the coolest shows, I mean, they just came out on stage and it was unbelievable. Thom sounded amazing, and there was just this thing that you felt. It’s very inviting. You don’t get, like, agoraphobia from the whole thing because that will be the battle with the stadium gigs. But I love stuff like this, and I’m really excited to be at SXSW. I can’t believe I haven’t made it here sooner, but I’m excited to be here now.
Have you ever come to check out bands or is this your first time ever here?
This is my first time here. I’ve been to Coachella many times, on many different, um, substances. I’ve been to Coachella many times but not remembered a lot of it, I’ll leave it at that. But I remember I used to go to Coachella a long time ago. I remember Coachella when there wasn’t like, paparazzi and stuff there. Like, I stood in an open field and one year I saw Nine Inch Nails and the next year I saw Weezer and I was standing in the middle of the field, you know, like tripping my mind out.
Teddy Riley Interview with BBC Radio1 Xtra
Well well, seems as if good ol' Teddy Riley was in the interview mood recently, and he talks a lot in depth about a number of items, including success advice, Michael Jackson, The Neptunes, Timbaland, etc... Watch him talk:
What do you guys think?
SBI - "UH-HUH UH-HUH"
Nine down, three left to go! So wants to hear another DJ Timmy T beat for Surrounded By Idiots?
Here you are:
UH-HUH UH-HUH by Livehouseent
Any thoughts on this?
Timbaland: The E! True Hollywood Story
Alright, enough waiting, here you go all our passionate visitors! Enjoy :)
THS Timbo by YardieGoals
It's a really touching story don't you agree? But that's our master going from being broke to do doing it big right there!
THS Timbo by YardieGoals
It's a really touching story don't you agree? But that's our master going from being broke to do doing it big right there!
SBI - "Scull Caps & Strip Shirts"
♪On the fourth day of Christmas, Larry Live gave for free, a NEW BEAT from DJ Timmy!♪
Quote from Live House: "For those that haven’t heard, THIS IS MAGOO, LARRY LIVE & MAGNUM AKA PHARRELL “Scull Caps & Strip Shirts” 1st song we ever recorded in a studio but u can’t tell by this mix. REMEMBER THIS IS STRAIGHT FROM A CASSETTE TAPE TO LOGIC TO A CD!!!!"
These tracks get better everyday!
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