Mr. Vegas claims Beyoncé shelved an entire dancehall album after one of its tracks leaked—but his story doesn’t quite line up.
In a fresh sit-down with DJ Vlad, the 50-year-old dancehall star revisited his work on Bey’s “Standing On The Sun.” He explained that the collab came after his 2012 hit “Bruk It Down” and that everything about the process was locked down in secrecy.
“It was like some top, you know, secret files,” Vegas recalled around the seven-minute mark. “We had to go through code and all kinds of things to get, you know … confidentiality agreements.”
Vegas said he wanted to keep the sound authentic, so he took the project back to Jamaica, linking up with Danny Browne (behind “Heads High”) and Clevie of Steely & Clevie to capture that raw dancehall vibe.
“We sent it to her and she wanted me to be more hardcore on the record because I was trying to be like trying to do like a ‘Baby Boy’ type of thing with Sean Paul vibe, and she was like ‘No, no.’ She wanted the raw thing,” he explained.
But according to Vegas, everything unraveled after a leak.
“Someone actually leaked the record, and the record started taking off on the East Coast,” he said. “People were calling me [like], ‘Oh, you and Beyoncé, it’s No. 1 on the station.’”
Vegas insists the leak killed the project, claiming Beyoncé “scrapped” the whole thing. He added that an engineer even played him what was supposedly her full dancehall album, including “Standing On The Sun.”
“The next day or two days after, I woke up and Beyoncé dropped a totally new project at 12 midnight,” Vegas said, referring to her surprise 2013 self-titled album. “No ‘Standing on the Sun,’ nothing I heard in the studio. So maybe because they leaked the record, she was pissed or something, I don’t know. But then, later on, she put it on a ‘platinum’ compilation.
“She loved the song. She still performs it on her tours. Someone leaked it, just my luck. It would have been another ‘Baby Boy,’” he added.
The problem with Mr. Vegas’ story is that the timeline just doesn’t add up.
“Standing on the Sun” first appeared in an H&M campaign back in April 2013, with the full version leaking online that June, according to Rolling Stone. Beyoncé’s surprise self-titled album didn’t drop until Dec. 13, 2013—and a “reggae remix” of the track only showed up later on the Platinum Edition re-release the following year.
It’s no secret that Beyoncé has an arsenal of unreleased music across genres. Even Jay-Z told Angie Martinez in 2013 that his wife had “100,000 amazing songs” stashed away (check it at the 2:53 mark of that interview).
But the idea that she swapped out an entire album at the last second doesn’t hold. Beyoncé shot the visuals for her self-titled project between June and November 2013, all while on her Mrs. Carter World Tour, as creative director Todd Tourso explained to Vulture. That same tour was where she gave her one and only live performance of “Standing on the Sun” in Antwerp, Belgium.
As for what’s next, Beyoncé’s upcoming release—the third and final act in the trilogy that kicked off with Renaissance in 2022 and Cowboy Carter in 2024—is rumored to dive into rock.
