“Then I played it for him, looked at him and said, `So, what are you gonna do now?’ “That inspired me to make the music exactly as you hear it,” he said. Inspired by this direction, he immediately crafted a track. Making the music honest was the goal: “That was the theme: what is necessary to live a good life.” “My job is to see something in him, and then provoke it to come out with music.” “I view songwriting with Jay-Z like scoring a movie,” said No ID. If moved by these tracks, Jay-Z gets to work, and starts writing the words. To this he added his own music and more, all with the mission of inspiring Jay-Z to express himself more openly than ever before. No ID, the architect of every beat and wizard of sonics, created a crazyqulit of samples from records by The Fugees, Stevie Wonder and Nini Simone. It’s the title track because it’s such a powerful song, and I just believe one of the best songs I’ve ever written.” So it became the title of the album and everything. And I woke up, literally, at 4:44 in the morning, 4:44 am, to write this song. “‘4:44’ is a song that I wrote,’ he said, “and it’s the crux of the album, just right in the middle of the album. He wanted to answer Beyonce’s songs about the problems in their marriage. The song emerged after Jay told No ID (the Chicago producer-writer Dion Wilson) that he wanted to write songs about things he’d never talked about before. The first single from his 13th album of the same name, released in 2017, the song “4:44” is exactly 4:44 in length. “I just believe it’s one of the best songs I’ve ever written,” said Jay-Z about the forthright and mystic “4:44.” It’s a song of love and apology to his wife Beyonce, and a response to songs on her album Lemonade, where she called him out for his infidelities. By Shawn (Jay-Z) Carter, Ernest Dion (No ID) Wilson and Kanan Howard Keeney