JOELLE JAMES: From what I remember, I was having terrible anxiety that day. I had a little bit of studio time booked out by an exec named Shawn Barron and he gave me the opportunity to go work. I had a really short amount of time and I was just nervous from that and having anxiety from a situation that was going on in my life at the time. It was my favorite way to write, it was just me and the engineer. I was going through beats and my life was all over the place. This one beat really stuck out to me. The original track that I wrote ”Boo’d Up” to had a sample of Johnny Gill on it, so it was really that classic R&B sound. It was the record from the Boomerang soundtrack, "There U Go." It was just R&B magic! [laughs]

All I knew was that I was in a situation where I wanted to tell this boy how I felt about him and I really couldn’t. The only way I could was through music and a song. I wrote it and it literally almost wrote itself. I started off the first line, “Feelings, so deep in my feelings,” and the whole thing kind of wrote itself from a real raw, authentic place that I was feeling at the moment. Even the hook, that was so unexpected because like I said, I had a short amount of time so I just wanted to get something good done and make it worth it. The "boo'd up" thing was just me scatting. I’m a real musical person, I went to Berklee College of Music so that’s really in my roots so I was just scatting on that and a jazzy type vibe. I didn’t even realize I said "boo'd up" until I was done. I felt like I needed to add lyrics and I listened to it a couple of times...then I was just like, I think I just want to leave it, I kind of like how it says boo’d up. That’s how I wanted to get across to the dude that I was interested in at the time so I just kept it. I knew from that moment leaving that it was a really special song.

2014 was really the first year that I really tried to write. When I was in that stage, I was so hungry to be in the studio and try to do it myself. Anita Baker was literally who was in the booth with me when I did “Boo’d Up.” My version is a little bit more sultry and sexy because I was really trying to lure this boy. I wanted him to hear this song so bad [laughs] and understand how I felt… That second verse, I was really like Ugh, what more do I have to do to get you to understand?! I’m a lady so I don’t do things untitled and such so I was really in a fantasy world when I wrote the song.

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[After I recorded it,] I didn’t even have the files for it because it was at an Atlantic studio, and they don’t give the writers the files. It’s their property at that point. I loved this song, I knew it was something special, and I had a lot of love and belief in it. Six months after it was written, I had a meeting with the executives at Atlantic and [Michael Caren] loved the record. Wale loved that record and he said it reminded him of Ashanti [and Ja Rule]’s ”Always On Time.” They had me come to this studio for like two weeks and just write, and write, and write after that. [They] played me what Wale had done to the record and it was super fire, it was dope, but then it just kind of disappeared. The whole dealing with Atlantic didn’t go through and then the record was just another record in my catalogue. I always played it and I had a few other artists that were interested in cutting it, but I just had such high standards for it that I was really looking for the best artist for the song. If it wasn’t going to be me, it needed to be someone special.