Jay-Z and Beyoncé blessed us with a surprise joint album on Saturday, June 16, and in new track “713,” the rapper reveals how they met for the first time. The album, Everything Is Love, is available on their streaming service, Tidal, and others, but in a new interview with Rolling Stone, music producers Cool and Dre dish on the track.
“I remember the night he pulled us into his studio and played it for us, he was like, ‘No one knows the story of how we met. This was the first time I’m ever telling this story,’” Dre told the magazine in an interview published on Monday, June 18. “Boom, he plays it for us. After we listened to the first verse and the hook and the beat played a couple times, he looks at us and he goes, ‘I never knew a love-ove-ove like this – oh s--t, I gotta cut this!”
“Just seeing how that came together, we literally were in the room when he started that second verse,” Cool added. “The ‘network’ line [‘Queen, I ain’t mean no disrespect/But the way I network, it’s hard for me to connect’] he came up with while he was in on the mic. He had his eyes closed and it just came to him. You know it came to him right away.”
In “713,” Jay raps about meeting Beyoncé at MTV’s Spring Break festival in Cancun, Mexico, in March 2000. As the lyrics go, they then sat next to each other on the flight home to New York City, but didn’t meet again until two years later.
“We played it cool at the pool of the Cancun, VMA / Confidence you exude make the fools stay away Me, I played my room, let the fools have they say,” Jay raps in the first verse. “Fate had me sittin’ next to you on the plane / And I knew straight away, uh.”
“The next time we would speak was like two years away / You had a man, you shut it down until you two had a break / I bet that dude rued the day,” he continues. “You kept me up on the phone while you were away / You came back, I let you set the date, Nobu on the plate / I brought my dude to play it cool, my first foolish mistake.”
Fast-forward eight years and the power couple then tied the knot in a top-secret ceremony in April 2008 and are now parents to Blue Ivy, 6, and twins Rumi and Sir, 11 months.
Click here to stream Everything Is Love.
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