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Missy Elliott sent Aaliyah fans into a heart-eye tizzy this week after she shared a special tidbit behind the making of one of the singer’s classic hits “4 Page Letter.”
The Grammy-award-winning artist and Timbaland helped the young star to produce the R&B hit, which appeared on her second studio album One In A Million in 1996, PEOPLE notes. Elliott’s heartwarming story about the “Are You That Somebody?” crooner came in response to a recent TikTok video that has gone viral of a comedian’s reenactment of what may have happened in the studio while Aaliyah was recording “4 Page Letter” decades ago.
The parody pokes fun at the song’s classic intro where Aaliyah can be heard asking someone in the studio, “turn my music up” as the song slowly builds into the intro. While the video drew in a few laughs from social media goers, some fans of “Baby Girl” were curious to know how the special moment actually occurred.
That’s when the “Work It” rapper hopped in to share a few fun facts about the recording process of the song, telling fans:
“.. when I was in the booth singing this my engineer had the music to low so I was telling him to turn it up but Aaliyah thought I meant to do it so she sung it like i did on the demo but it was a mistake but she loved it so we kept it like that,” Elliott tweeted.
The 50-year-old continued:
“And since Babygirl loved the mistake I told Jimmy the engineer to keep raising the music on the track everytime she say turn it up so it would make sense to the listeners so y’all wouldn’t think we was crazy this skit is damn near what happened tho.”
Fans of the late star thanked Elliott for sharing the sweet story and asked to hear more about the singer’s legacy. Aaliyah died in a horrific plane crash in 2001 at the age of 22.
Last month, the singer’s music finally became available on Spotify and a few other streaming services. According to Billboard, her uncle and former manager, Barry Hankerson, signed a distribution deal with Empire allowing for Aaliyah’s album One In A Million to hit streaming services. The decades-long battle came to an end on August 20, just days before the 20th anniversary of the singer’s death on August 25.
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