Gimme Dat (feat. Wiz...
Ayra Starr, Wizkid
The vibe of the day was I had lost my voice, I was in the studio and I wasn't sounding as I wanted. My sound engineer
was laughing at me. So I became more cranky, but we made it work. The first version I wasn't feeling, because of my
voice. Then the next day I went to the studio and I did it again. And it came out amazing. Back then, I always used to
make songs about confidence and being that girl. But this was one of those songs that’s about love, being sexy and you
know, a boy. I'm usually not the best at writing love songs. I can write a heartbreak song in my sleep, but you see the
other way around is so hard for me. So when I heard the song, I was like, wait, this is sexy. There was like a whole
intervention for me. My team were very dramatic. They had a call and were like, “Ayra, we need to talk to you. We think
you should release Gimme Dat”. I was like, okay, “why are there 15 people on the phone? It's not that deep”. I went
home, I told my mom and she told me to just pray about it and think about it. I said, okay, I'm ready. Let's take it to
mixing. Let's master it. Let's release it. We had shot the video already literally like four months before. I
co-directed this video but didn’t really like it. So I was like, okay, let's send it to Wizkid. He said, “I love the
song. I'm going to do it, I got you.” Wizkid recorded the song in like three days. Nobody else would have been right on
that song asides from Wizkid. Even just his sonics and the sound, the chorus pattern was definitely very Wizkid. It
feels very like sexy Afrobeats. And everybody knows Wiz is the king of sexy Afrobeats. In the first music video, I had
long hair and that was a whole era for me. Then I was like instead of shooting something entirely new, I can just show
people how like I'm leaving that era behind. So I came out of the car like a phoenix with my new my short hair. We just
combined two stories into one.
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