Mr. Vegas Dubiously Claims Beyoncé Scrapped a Dancehall Album Because She Was ‘Pissed’ Over Leak

Mr. Vegas is claiming that Beyoncé completely scrapped a dancehall album after one of its songs leaked, but his timeline doesn’t match up.

In a newly released interview with DJ Vlad, the 50-year-old Jamaican dancehall artist spoke about working with Bey for her track “Standing On The Sun.” He described how he got involved in a dancehall project after the success of his 2012 song “Bruk It Down.”

According to Mr. Vegas, an industry contact helped connect him to Beyoncé, and the process was treated with extreme secrecy.

“It was like some top, you know, secret files,” Vegas recalled near the seven-minute mark. “We had to go through code and all kinds of things to get, you know … confidentiality agreements.”

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Vegas said he wanted to deliver something authentic and “took the project” to Jamaica and worked with Danny Browne, who produced “Heads High,” and Clevie from Steely & Clevie, to capture the raw dancehall sound.

“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,” Mr. Vegas said.

However, things supposedly took a turn after Vegas delivered the material.

“Someone actually leaked the record, and the record started taking off on the East Coast,” he claimed. “People were calling me [like], ‘Oh, you and Beyoncé, it’s No. 1 on the station.’”

Vegas says he believes the leak derailed everything, as Beyoncé had supposedly “scrapped” the project entirely. He also claimed that an engineer played for him Beyoncé’s 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 of the singer’s 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 concluded.

The only problem is that his account doesn’t quite match the record.

“Standing on the Sun” first surfaced via an H&M campaign in April 2013. The complete version of the track leaked online that June, per Rolling Stone.

Beyoncé’s surprise self-titled album didn’t arrive until Dec. 13, 2013. A “reggae remix” of the track was included in the Platinum Edition re-release the following year.

It’s likely that Beyoncé has a trove of unreleased songs that span different genres. After all, Jay-Z told Angie Martinez in 2013 that his wife has “100,000 amazing songs” in the vault (you can watch that moment here at the 2:53 mark).

However, the claim that Beyoncé swapped out an album at the last minute doesn’t add up.

Beyoncé shot the visuals for her self-titled album between June and November 2013 while on the road for her Mrs. Carter World Tour, according to an interview the project’s creative director Todd Tourso gave Vulture. It was also on that tour that she gave her only performance of “Standing on the Sun” in Antwerp, Belgium.

Beyoncé’s upcoming album, the third and final act of a trilogy that began with 2022’s Renaissance and continued with last year’s Cowboy Carter, is rumored to be a reclamation of rock music.