The last duo anyone would expect to collaborate on a song is neo-soul icon Jill Scott and Houston rapper Paul Wall, but in 2011, they linked for what Wall said is one of his favorite features in his career. If you’ve ever heard the track, you know it’s a sultry song with very explicit language, and according to the Houston artist, that wasn’t always the case.
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Wall recently sat down for an interview with “The Art of Dialogue” speaking on how he met Scott and what led to the magical song called “So Gone (What My Mind Says)” in 2011. But the two actually met several years before in 2005.
“She’s somebody who’s connected to the universe on another level,” Wall said about Scott. “She’s such a powerful person to me.”
Scott initially reached out to get Wall on a track that same year, but things didn’t work out. They remained friends and in 2011, another opportunity for Wall to feature on one of her songs came up. Wall continued saying Scott was experiencing writer’s block and surprisingly enlisted his help in the studio. But after finding out she wanted a verse from him, he said he was hesitant.
“In my mind, it’s Jill Scott… somebody who’s got a vocal range out of this world,” Wall said. “She also isn’t vulgar at all. The earlier Jill Scott, she wasn’t very vulgar at all.” At the time, Scott was one of the leading voices of neo-soul– the contemporary R&B genre with jazz and funk elements.
“Neo-soul wasn’t vulgar at all. If it was sexual, it was all innuendo. Encoded talk,” Wall continued of the genre. So when he wrote his verse for Scott, Wall said he kept things PG-13.
“It wasn’t like, ‘I’mma f**k you’ and this and that, all that kind of language. She asked me to get on the song, I’m like, ‘Alright, I’mma do a verse.’ But the verse is very clean,” he said. Well, Scott came back and told him to make the verse dirtier…Which Wall wasn’t expecting.
He continued, “I’m like, ‘Are you sure?’ I ain’t never heard that language on a Jill Scott song…The neo-soul community might whoop my ass if I’m on here talking like that.” He said, “My Mamma might whoop my ass, my Auntie might jump me!”
The “Sittin’ Sidewayz” rapper said he went back and recorded another version of the verse, but Scott told him to go back and make it even more vulgar. “She kept telling me lines she wanted me to say,” Wall continued, even adding Scott wrote most of his verse herself. “The last thing she said was, ‘I want you to say… It might sound crazy, but I want you to say, that’s what a diamond chip d**k do,’” he said. That iconic line ended his verse on the song.
According to Wall, “So Gone (What My Mind Says)” was inspired by “real life events.” So we guess we now know what happens when art imitates real life!
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