Interview by: Frankie P
When and where did you make the track?
That track was made in this dusty attic studio i was working out of in Brooklyn. It was in a house where there used to be an indie label called “Makin Records” and all the underground rappers in BK had passed through this house at one point or another. Its actually where I first met Bruce Wayne while we were working on the same artist, The Bad Seed. That track was created in the summertime of 2001, right before 911.
What did the artist think when they first heard it?
50 and I had a mutual friend Dino Devaille who at the time was an A&R exec at Universal and was trying to sign him over there. I had given Dino a stack of beat CDs to pass along to 50, he was just starting his mixtape campaign and this was more than a year before he signed to Interscope. I wasnt there when he first listened to the track but he must have fell in love with it because they cut the song immediately. It was one of those beats that you hear and immediately it catches you.
What was the studio session like?
I couldn’t get out to Long Island where he was recording, 50 was recording tons of material and putting out mixtape after mixtape. They were really excited about the record because the day they cut it i got a phone call with everyone on the line and they played it for me on the phone. 50 said it was his favorite record and to hold it for his album, and this was about 10 months before he even knew where he was going to sign.
First time you heard it on radio or in club what were you thinking?
That song got so big so fast, it was crazy. It came out right before the summer ’03 and i was still riding the D-Train back and forth from the Bronx and it seemed like it was on everybody’s headphones, and in every car that drove by. I remember going up to Hot 97 when it was the #1 song in New York and Enuff asked me “whats next?” and i was thinking this was the break I had been waiting for so Bruce and I used it to execute our plan to start building our label Family Ties and get more production work.
Anything else you can tell us that revolves around that track (funny story or weird event that happened with the track)?
I had used a small piece of a Barry White guitar lick from the intro of one of his songs, thats the main guitar chopped up you hear in the song. Well, at the time Barry was still alive but on his deathbed and it was very difficult to get the clearance. I remember Sha Money and I getting on a conference call with his manager and trying to get the approval, she was asking what i did to the sample and how i chopped it up and all these crazy questions. It was so close that Interscope apparently had a version of the album mastered without “21 Questions”. The other thing most people may not know is that originally 50 Cent had sung the hook, he wrote the whole melody and everything. That song will always be special to me, it was our first #1 and after all the drama it ended up being one of the biggest songs that year.
