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Dallas Austin has written and produced for some of the most iconic artists of our time. So as you can imagine he has plenty of stories about all of the artists he’s worked with over the decades. Recently, during an interview with Claudia Jordan on her show Out Loud with Claudia Jordan on Fox Soul, he shared how he penned songs for women that resonated with women around the world.
See what he had to say.
Claudia Jordan: As a man, how are you able to speak so well and create these songs from a male perspective and women are like, that’s exactly how I feel?
Dallas Austin: It’s two things. I was friends with them more than guys. Because I was music guy. I wasn’t a football guy or whatever. And I would hear what they were going through. I hear what they would talk about, how they would say it. I’d have those conversations with him as a friend.
As I started to get into songwriting, listening to L.A. and Babyface, Jimmy and Terry, and stuff like that. I was like these guys are writing really songs for Janet. So when I was writing for a girl, I knew how to write things they wouldn’t necessarily say on their sleeve but how they felt. She would say, ‘I cheated on you. I didn’t want to but I just needed some attention. You weren’t there for me so I had to creep. You would have did it. You would have crept out too.
It’s two parts. These are some things that I’ve done before. You get into it and she says, ‘You did this. You did this, that and the other.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh man.’ I just had an understanding of where they were coming from and I could take that thing and regurgitate it another way. Most of those three minute stories that you make into songs, girls are going to have a lot of emotions about. It’s going to be whole different playing field. It’s nothing, really, you can’t say. A guy can’t come off too soft or too arrogant. Women have a bigger range of things to write about.
T-Boz, she wouldn’t sing anything a girl would sing about. She’d say it’s too soft. Chilli can sing that. Chilli wouldn’t sing nothing that the guys would sing. It was hard to get Chilli out of dresses when we first started TLC. She’s a woman. She’s a girl. But T-Boz has always been a guy’s girl. That’s why I cast Lauren London as her in ATL.”
You can listen to the full interview between Dallas and Claudia Jordan in the video below.
