Even though it became a strip club anthem, “Bandz A Make Her Dance” almost didn’t end up that way. While listening to the Mike WiLL Made It beat last year, Juicy J thought the song would make a great soundbed for a love song.
“The beat reminded me of some Quiet Storm shit,” Juicy J says during an interview with Billboard. “It starts so slow, and it’s really melodic.”
Then the Juice Man headed to the bathroom. “A lot of times when I’m recording, I smoke weed, I freestyle, and if I’m trying to get that last bar or that ending of the song, I’ll go to the bathroom, because I always come up with shit in the bathroom,” Juicy J says during the interview. “I mean, I’ve written many, many songs in the bathroom.”
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“Bandz A Make Her Dance,” which sold 1 million downloads as per Billboard, is slated to appear on Juicy J’s Stay Trippy album, which is scheduled for an August 27 release.
Stay Trippy follows Juicy J’s run as an independent act and a major label artist with Three 6 Mafia, the group he formed with DJ Paul in Memphis, Tennessee in the mid-1990s. After the crew released its most recent album, 2008’s Last 2 Walk, Juicy J returned to his independent roots and released a string of indie projects, including the Rubba Band Business mixtape series.
“I was just doing songs with people from my hood,” Juicy J says. “I had a street team passing out mixtapes, and sometimes I would get out there and pass out a couple mixtapes myself, just to get the feeling back.”
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While working on his mixtapes, Juicy J developed a relationship with Wiz Khalifa and strengthened his friendship with producer Dr. Luke. “As Three 6 was sort of disintegrating, we would get together and just write for fun,” Dr. Luke says to Billboard. “I’d go to his house [in L.A.]. He’d go to my house. When we were writing a bunch. This was before ‘Bandz’ but after [Three 6 Mafia’s 2005 hit single] ‘Stay Fly’. He was always grinding. He’d write a song every day, and he’d tell me, ‘One of them’s gonna go.'”
Stay Trippy will be released through Dr. Luke’s Kemosabe imprint through Columbia Records, which also released several Three 6 Mafia projects.
Thanks to the success of “Bandz A Make Her Dance” and subsequent singles “Show Out” featuring Young Jeezy and Big Sean and “Bounce It” with Wale and Trey Songz, Juicy J is slated to appear at Rock The Bells 2013 and may headline a college tour this fall. The rapper-producer, who grew up poor in Memphis, says he uses that background as inspiration to succeed and to stay busy working.
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“I come from nothing,” he says. “When I got a chance to make some money, I was like, ‘Man, I’m not ever going back.'”
