Sometimes the best things come to us when we least expect them, and the most intentional people have happy accidents. For Timbaland, that’s exactly the case when it comes to his song “Try Again” with the late, great, Aaliyah.
In the first episode of the “I Am Hip-Hop” series on the I Am Athlete YouTube channel, Timbo revealed that “Try Again” was the result of him making a mistake while playing around on the keyboard. “My engineer Jimmy Douglass caught it. I said, ‘Jimmy did you catch that little rhythm?’ He said, ‘I sure did,” Timbaland recalls. “So he caught it and played it back, I put the beat on it. I said, ‘Ooh, chop it right there,’ and he chopped it right there.”
The lyrics for the song were originally crafted by the late Static Major, but were altered slightly for the official version of the song. Timbaland says he knew he had something cool on his hands, but it was when Jay-Z came to the studio and was like “oh my god” in response to hearing it for the first time that he knew it was truly a hit.
