Earlier this year, I was taken by surprise when I heard a new song with a similar narrative. The song is called “Without You” and it’s by Stacy Barthe, an LA-based up-and-coming talent who made her bones as a songwriter and is now breaking out on her own as a singer.
I recently interviewed Barthe for Billboard. We discussed a lot of things, all which you can check out here. The portion that didn’t make it into the interview, was our little talk about “Without You”.
The song features a guest appearance by Frank Ocean, who takes over on the last verse. This was before Frank Ocean became 2011′s it-boy of R&B. Barthe explains how the collaboration came to be in her own words below…
What happened was, I was in the studio working on it. I started it the day before, and I came back the next day and told the engineer to let me go in to record different parts. The humming part came just because I was waiting on the engineer to start recording me, so I kept that part in, and I wrote out the lyrics.
By the end of the night, Frank came just to hang out, like around 11. He heard the record and I asked him to get on it, and this was before Nostalgia/Ultra, and everything else. He wrote his verse in the booth in like 20 minutes and dropped it. It was crazy, because I asked him what angle he was going to come from, and I didn’t expect him to come at it from that angle. What’s funny is, when he clears his throat, I was like, ‘Why do you keep doing that?’ He said, “Oh, no no, I’m keeping that in there.” That was intentional.
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