“You don’t realise a song has impacted so many people until you’re on the street and talk to people. “I wrote from such personal experiences, I never imagined that someone else would ever want to sing about my ex-boyfriend! So I was like, ‘Tell her, thank you,’ but they were like, ‘No, you don’t understand, she has to have this song!’ Then I got lots of calls from lots of people being very, very persuasive, and the next thing I know, Beyoncé is singing the song and I’m getting signed to Clive Davis’ label, J Records. Then I believe Toby had a meeting with Beyoncé, and when she heard If I Were A Boy she said, ‘That’s it! I want to record that right now.’īC Jean: “I never imagined that someone else would ever want to sing about my ex-boyfriend!” “The song wasn’t supposed to go to anybody, though – I wanted to sing it! Everyone wanted to sign me, but some people were trying to get it to their bigger artists because they knew it was such a smash. Toby was crying, going ‘Oh my God, this is a smash!’ so he definitely knew it was special. Then we recorded the demo that day, which I never changed – that was the one that Beyoncé eventually heard. “It was probably the easiest song I’ve ever written. We ran back to the studio and it was what I like to call a therapy session or diary entry, because I’d finally decided to open my heart and 20 minutes later we had a song! I’d eat the pizza and the popcorn.’ He was like, ‘That’s so weird, how would you sing that?’ He put a recorder in front of my mouth and I sang, ‘If I were a boy…’ just like that. I was trying to fit into my skinny jeans, watching my weight and all that stuff, and I was like, ‘Oh man, I wish were a boy right now. Toby carried around a recorder and any time I said something ‘weird’, as he called it, he’d record it. We were walking through Times Square on a lunch break. “When eventually I did, it was a complete accident. I was 20 years old at this point, I was with my first boyfriend and things were going really well, but during the course of writing with Toby I found out my boyfriend had cheated on me. I flew to New York to work with him and wrote a handful of songs. I’d written lots of songs and used those demos to get to the next producer I wanted to work with, and met Toby Gad – he’d worked with The Veronicas and Fergie and had a couple of cool hits. US chart position: 3“I wanted to be a singer, so songwriting was just part of the deal for me.

Lyrics beyonce if i were a boy