As she told The Hartford Courant:Īt first I was confused, because I never thought of myself as writing songs for other people. For starters, Jean knew nothing about Beyoncé knowing about the song (let alone recording it) until Gad called to tell her. In the UK, it reached Number 1.īut for all the good that this song brought Beyoncé, there were a few hiccups. “If I Were A Boy” peaked at Number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. “If I Were A Boy” reached the top 10 on two dozen charts around the world. Within 30 minutes, they had written “If I Were A Boy.” Gad told Jean, “We just wrote a smash.” She listed a few things she would do, and because she was heartbroken from a recent breakup, she said, “I’d be a better man than my ex.” The two returned to the studio, where they used the dialogue from that recorded conversation to write some lyrics. Gad, who had his tape recorder with him, asked Jean what else she would do if she were a boy. But if she were a boy, she said, she could just eat the pizza without caring. Jean said that she really wanted some pizza, but because she was trying to not eat carbs, she didn’t think she should. Jean smelled some pizza, which caused her to say, “I wish I were a boy.” Gad, confused, asked her to elaborate. On a break from writing, they went to Times Square. Over a week or so, they wrote several songs together.
He invited her to come to New York City, where he was living at the time. Through MySpace, she met producer Toby Gad. Singer-songwriter BC Jean was 17 when she moved from San Diego to Los Angeles to pursue a career in music in the mid-2000s. You can listen to the songs in a Spotify playlist. Read about it here and see the list of previous songs here. A new post about a different song is posted each Monday. This is the 98th post in a weekly series.