Rae Sremmurd’s Swae Lee Came Up With Beyonce’s “Formation” Concept, Mike Will Made-It Says

Rae Sremmurd’s Swae Lee was behind the concept of Beyoncé’s “Formation,” Mike WiLL Made-It tells the New Yorker in a lengthy new profile. Will says Swae Lee was credited as a co-writer on the track, which Will produced, having contributed its central lyric—“O.K. ladies, now let’s get in formation”—during a freestyled songwriting session at Coachella. “I’m like, ‘Dog, we got to do that “get in formation” shit,’” Will says. “That could be a hard song for the ladies. Some woman-empowerment shit. Like, ‘Ladies, let’s get in line, let’s not just fall for anything.’” They booked a studio, and Swae Lee “ended up just laying it down” over beat recorded by Mike Will-affiliate A Pluss. 

Will later ran into Bey at a hotel-room hangout with LeBron James and the Cavaliers, he says. “And Bey was like, ‘Yo, I like that “formation” idea.’ And I told her what I was thinking about the woman empowerment, and she was like, ‘Yeah I kinda like that idea.’ And she just left it like that.” Although Beyoncé wrote new verses for the song, she built around the central mantra. “We were just thinking about it being a female anthem,” Will added. “Because I knew I just wanted a banger with Beyoncé, like a ‘Single Ladies,’ but I wanted it to be a new kind of chant.”

Will spent a week in the studio with Beyoncé working on the track. She “took this one little idea we came up with on the way to Coachella, put it in a pot, stirred it up, and came with this smash,” he says. “She takes ideas and puts them with her own ideas, and makes this masterpiece. She’s all about collaborating.” He added, “That’s what makes her Beyoncé. Being able to know what she wants. A lot of people don’t know what they want. To the point where you can bring them some hot shit, and they’re like, ‘This shit ain’t it. I need a hit, bro.’ And I’m like, ‘Man, this is a hit. If you don’t like this line or that line, you should take this line out and put your own lines in there, and we doctor it up.’ Some people want it cooked. They just want to put a little icing on it and bite it. But it’s really a process to make one of these great songs. It’s layers. Layers and layers and layers.”

Another gem in the profile comes when the author, John Seabrook, witnesses first-hand the perils of Will’s obsession with natural organic juices. “As it happened, I was passing through Atlanta on the day of his return,” Seabrook writes, “and [Will] agreed to give me a lift in the Mercedes S63, which he had left at the airport the month before. The ‘goddam natural organic juices’ in his car refrigerator had been fermenting in the heat all that time, and the interior smelled putrid. Exclaiming, ‘Goddam, dog, this shit ain’t cool!,’ Will drove the car at high speed with the windows down to the apartment of Brian Wright, his marketing manager, where he met a friend who has a mobile car wash.”

Read the full profile here.

via Jazz Monroe