MC: How do you tap into this process of immediacy?
Allen: Sometimes that takes fucking hours just to get that initial idea that gets me going. Once I get one lyric and I’m happy with it, then I’m up and away, and I can start really getting into it. That’s when I get excited. Sometimes it comes quickly and sometimes it takes hours and is really painful.
MC: How do your co-writers co-exist with this flow?
Allen: Because I come completely unprepared, whomever I’m writing with is held ransom by me, because they can’t progress with the track anymore until I’ve done something. So they have to wait for my thoughts to come. And this depends on what’s going on in my life.
MC: What specific instruments inspire your concepts?
Allen: Tempo is a big thing, the beat in itself, the drums. That sets the mood for me. For the song “Hard Out Here” I was listening to the Chemical Brothers. That was what set off the tempos. Then it evolved into the opening lyrics for the verse and it became a song about the word “bitch.”
MC: So much has changed in your life since your last release. You’re now married, and the mother of two children. How did you balance your creative modes with motherhood?
Allen: I was writing a lot when I was pregnant with my second baby and other than being in the studio I was pretty inactive. So I was looking after a child at home, an infant who couldn’t communicate, my husband was out, I wasn’t out with my friends and I was pregnant with another baby. So there really wasn’t a lot going on that I felt I could write about, until my second daughter was six months old. When I stopped breast-feeding, I suddenly felt like I could write again.
MC: Some new mothers have observed that their verbal skills diminish under these circumstances.
Allen: I think the brain shrinks because it is concentrating on keeping this baby inside you alive. I lost half of my vocabulary! I would go out with my friends for dinner and I couldn’t finish sentences or think of words. Writing is this really important thing that I do. The thought that I couldn’t do it anymore it was terrifying.
MC: “If I told you about my sex life/You’d call me a slut/Them boys be talking ‘bout their bitches/No one’s making a fuss.” These lines from “Hard Out Here” address the double standard.
Allen: It’s a funny game. It’s not easy for women; it’s tough for men in the business as well to adjust. They’re not in control of us anymore; we’re in control of our own destinies. That’s one of the reason that they try to pit women against each other.
(At this point in the interview, Allen’s oldest daughter Ethel commandeers the phone. “I’m talking to a man in Los Angeles,” Allen explains sweetly. For the next few minutes, the trans-Atlantic sounds of an irrepressible two-year-old interacting with her chirpy mother and gabbing to MC fill the airwaves. While Allen regains control of the phone she comments, “If I’m like, ‘I can’t pay attention to you right now,’ they start screaming more and more.”)
MC: The lyrics for Sheezus are very tightly formulated: we enjoy the sound-alike rhyme of “comparison” with “embarrassing” in the title track.
Allen: A lot of times that’s the basis of it. People think there’s a lot more to it, but sometimes it’s just about two interesting words that rhyme with each other. I think that’s the skill, finding those words that sound good together and making them connect and making it be a real story without the words being “lazy,” “crazy” or “shady” or whatever. That’s the fun for me.
