As the old adage goes, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. In 2016, that’s precisely what Beyoncé Knowles-Carter did. Lemonade, Beyoncé’s sixth album, garnered enormous praise and widespread pop cultural attention for both its raw and open lyrical content – exploring the aftermath of infidelity – and for demonstrating her most ambitious musical palette yet.
Across its 12 tracks, Beyoncé blended a smorgasbord of musical touch-points, meshing them with her renowned penchant for crafting (and delivering) hugely effective pop songwriting. From the spiky, lo-fi blues rock of Don’t Hurt Yourself to the country-tinged Daddy Lessons (a song which kickstarted a stetson-toting journey that culminated in her most recent release, Cowboy Carter) to the zippy electronica of the Mike Dean-produced Love Drought, Lemonade was as musically fearless as its lyrical heroine.
Ostensibly a thematic concept album that explored the emotional response to being cheated on (informed by real-world marital issues with her husband, Jay Z), the record’s scope broadens to contextualise her personal struggle within the legacy of black emancipation and the ongoing battles for racial equality (Freedom), paternal influence (Daddy Lessons) and the wider topic of female empowerment (All Night). The result was a near-perfect marriage of the personal and the political.
For Lemonade, the songwriting approach assimilated ideas from a wide-variety of sources, sampling well-known songs and fusing melodies and harmonic structures produced by an array of songwriters across a wide spectrum of music.
One of her key collaborators, Diana Gordon (who co-wrote the infectious highlight, Sorry) reflected that, “Beyoncé is a scientist of songs. I’ve never seen anyone work the way she works. She definitely changes the song structures. She can take two songs, say, ‘I like two lines, I like the melody then let me use that for a verse and a bridge and write the whole middle.’ It’s more of a collaboration. You never know what she’ll like,” Gordon told Entertainment Weekly.
HOW LEMONADE ESTABLISHES ITS THEMES
From the outset, Lemonade subtly distorts conventional pop pretence. Opener Pray You Catch Me serves as a stark piano and vocal-centred overture to the album’s rawer strands, and re-introducing a shattered and resigned Beyoncé.
Harmonically, we’re based in the melancholic key of G#minor, an apt accompaniment to the scornful – and direct – lyric, which paints a picture of an emotionally crushed lyrical protagonist, facing up to the reality of her situation, with a ‘lonely ear, pressed against the walls of your world’.
Originally written as a demo by songwriter Kevin Garrett, this minimal, fragile structure is enhanced by some sweeping strings and throbs of pained low-end, compounded by some extremely effective backing vocal processing. On their collaboration, Garrett told Billboard that, “[Pray You Catch Me] is an incredibly special song to me because of the way it was written, lyrics first and on a guitar. Once she added her voice and her honesty to the track, it really pushed everything over the top.”
From this decaying ruin, springs Hold Up., blaring with intensity and serving (quite literally) a siren call. Originating as a song penned by Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and borrowing the chorus refrain from the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Maps, Hold Up took on quite a different form from its indie-rock based origin point. “I figured it was going to be a Vampire Weekend song but was easily convinced that it could go to a new place as a Beyoncé song” Koeneig tweeted. “Beyoncé 100% made it here own and I’m very glad to have been a part of it.”
Hold Up’s arrangement incorporates looping beats, stabbing calypso rhythms and bone-vibrating sub bass kicks, operating within a constricted C Major-key chord sequence. It’s an odd arrangement, and one which has been perhaps best described (as it was by Pitchfork journalist Ryan Dombal) as having “no weight, no place, no time – a calypso dream heard through walls and generations.”
RECORDING DON’T HURT YOURSELF
Though this lurching opening salvo is an arresting introduction to the record, it’s really on the album’s garage rock-leaning third track, Don’t Hurt Yourself, where the listener fully grasps Lemonade’s musical breadth. We spoke with Lemonade’s central mix engineer, Stuart White, and asked him firstly how this raucous monolith – which features a guest vocal from Jack White amidst a saturated and intense vocal performance from Beyoncé – was put together; “[Jack] had recorded the initial tracks in his studio on tape and and then I think he had an 8-track. Then she did all her vocals. We just used a Shure SM58, and we recorded [Beyonce’s] voice with no headphones, and the speakers on.”
“There was some distortion on the mic,” Stuart continues. “Once we recorded the vocals, I adjusted the EQ to be more present, But recording Beyoncé’s voice with just the track coming out of the speakers is great for getting ‘feel’ from the artist.” White confirms that this track is his favourite on the record.
Stuart tells us that a set consideration for the record was to augment the low-end of all the tracks, “We typically push for a fatter bottom [end] in in the music, so that was one way we sort of pulled [tracks like] Don’t Hurt Yourself into our world – by beefing up the kick and the bass relationship.”
Now a multi-Grammy winning mix engineer, Stuart White had previously worked on Beyonce’s 2013 self-titled record, and would go on to mix engineer her follow-ups Renaissance and Cowboy Carter in 2022 and 2024 respectively. Though some tracks differed, a core vocal chain for capturing Beyoncé was firmly established during the Lemonade sessions. “We use [a range] of different mics, but the core chain is a Telefunken ELAM 251, into an Avalon VT-737, mic pre, into a Tube Tech CL 1B compressor.
HOW BEYONCE MERGED GENRES
As the album progresses, the twin emotional pillars of despair and fury (established by the record’s two opening tracks) ascend to greater levels of intensity.
From the uncompromising resilience of the record’s biggest hit, Freedom (which guest-features a fierce Kendrick Lamar) to the beautiful, bereft purity of the piano-oriented Sandcastles, and the James Blake-starring Forward, Lemonade deftly juggles vulnerability with relentless, visceral power,
In the studio(s), Beyoncé was hands-on with the mix-shaping process; “She’s really hands-on, and she’s really good at just, you know, making that stuff work musically, Stuart White explains to us. “Her self-titled album (in 2013) was a step in that direction of mixing styles, and Lemonade was even more an exercise in combining different genres.”
White recalls that the record was recorded across numerous different studios, including Jungle City in New York, and The Record Plant in Los Angeles, but the lion’s share of the mixing was done by Stuart at Pacifique Studios in Burbank, California. “The more we work together, the more the shorthand gets better,” Stuart tells us. “She’s very hands-on, and [with songwriting] she’s good at getting things to a place where it makes sense musically, and I’m mixing as I go with her, as we’re recording. I’m mixing all the time.”
One of Lemonade’s most vital tracks was one where Beyoncé found herself operating in a more stylised country aesthetic. Daddy Lessons amalgamates some jazzier, New Orleans-leaning elements with an authentic country chordal structure and arrangement.
Written in conjunction with singer/songwriter Diana (aka Wynter) Gordon alongside producer/writers Alex Delicata and Kevin Cossom, the sound of the track naturally evolved into this domain during the writing sessions. As Kossom told Billboard; “It’s a girl that grew up tough. Her father was hard on her, and didn’t want nobody to take advantage of her. Definitely one of those situations. It painted a country picture in our minds. It didn’t take the hip-hop element to make it tough, which I think is very cool especially for Beyoncé. And it goes with her being from Texas. Her vibe to it just makes sense for how it all came together.”
MIX ENGINEERING LEMONADE
Producing Daddy Lessons, along with the other genre-blurring moments on the record, were a real thrill for Stuart White, who tells us, “As an engineer I always work well when doing different genres, because I grew up in the 90s, glued to MTV. I was listening to all types of music.”
Despite the joy of working on such a colourful album, the pressure of time was an overhanging shadow. “The deadlines are always the challenging part,” Stuart explains. “When you get with any big artist you have creative sparks and lots of ideas towards the end of the process. We all stay up for days, and work every day, exercising different possibilities to get to the final finished product. I feel like all great artists kind of work that way. Then, you know, there’s a final push at the end.”
The album’s lead single (and concluding track) was the incendiary Formation – a track that would later be adopted by the Black Lives Matter movement as an anthem. Originating as a beat programmed by collaborator Pluss in FL Studio, the track organically grew into an anthem call-to-arms, a marching band-leaning strut complete with horns and New Orleans-leaning elements.
Another major component of Lemonade – much like its predecessor – was the fact that an accompanying film was being produced in tandem with the album sessions. Occasionally, these visuals could dictate new approaches to the sounds of the mixes in progress, as Stuart remembers;
“We had to update the audio to the video team on a constant basis, which added another level to the complexity of Lemonade. Sometimes you’d see stuff visually and it would inspire something sonically. From a mixing standpoint, there’s an intro part that I helped create on Sorry. I half-timed the intro and did a filter sweep. It was because they needed a part to play during the film while Serena Williams was walking down the staircase. So, I just sat there, messed around with the tracks that we already had in the computer, and just half-timed it in Pro Tools; I wrote in some automation to do the filter sweep.”
Sorry is a critical track on Lemonade, infusing its R&B swagger with a bubbling stew of synth sounds. Originally concocted by DJ and producer MeLo-X, Beyoncé would transform this dancehall-inspired prototype into a pulsing, coruscating highpoint of the record. Though thematically, the album’s target had perhaps been more shrouded on surrounding tracks, Sorry brings its target into laser-sharp focus. “Big homie better grow up” sings Beyoncé – an allusion to the moniker adopted by her real-life husband on 2003’s monster hit, Crazy in Love.
The song also ends with a reference to ‘Becky with the good hair’ – A character who (as fans interpret) is presumed to be the woman with whom the lyrical protagonist’s partner cheated. Is she a real person? The debate rages on…
RESPONSE AND LEGACY
Released on April 23rd 2016, Lemonade – and its accompanying HBO-premiered film – was a phenomenal success, yielding Beyoncé’s most impassioned critical acclaim to date. It’s still regarded, by many, as her high-watermark. “It’s funny, a lot of people have different opinions on which one is the best. Or ‘the masterpiece’ or whatever,” Stuart tells us. “It’s always fun to see what people like and respond to. “You can jog yourself crazy with details and want to change things [in retrospect] but that’s the cool thing about art – you have to let it go. As an engineer, we’re assisting the artistic process. It’s not exactly our art, but we’re a part of it, you know. She loves that album, and the fans definitely have singled Lemonade out over the years.”
We ask Stuart how the experience of working with Beyoncé has evolved over subsequent years, “I’ve been with her 12 years now, we’re still working together. In the beginning, I never thought I would spend 12 years working with her. I think because first and foremost, she’s such an amazing human being, and because it’s so fun to work with an artist so talented and fearless. She’s such a real artist – in the way she looks at music [and] visuals, it’s so fulfilling to work on projects like Lemonade. I’m very grateful, and I feel very fortunate to have been able to do these things and continue to grow and evolve together.”
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