Questions to Ask Beyonce

The questions

Open any question to see why it works.

1. 1

   What is the first song you remember singing in front of other people?

   A gentle opener that also gets you past the press-kit version of the origin story. Performers tend to remember the room and the reaction rather than the song, and that detail is where an interview starts to sound like a person.

2. 2

   Which of your own songs is hardest to sing live?

   This gets a technical answer rather than a promotional one, and technical answers are where artists relax. Follow up on what she changes to make it survive a two hour set, because those changes are invisible to the audience.

3. 3

   When you build a show, what comes first: the setlist or the staging?

   The order reveals how she thinks. Setlist first means the show is built around the emotional arc of the music, staging first means it is built around the room, and both answers lead somewhere worth following.

4. 4

   What does a show day look like from the moment you wake up?

   Ask for the hours rather than the feeling. The rehearsal, the sound check, the vocal warm up, the meal, the point of no return before the first cue: this is the part of the job nobody outside it can picture.

5. 5

   What has gone wrong on stage that the audience never noticed?

   Every long tour has these, and the recovery is the good story. It also gets you past the polished answers, because near-disasters are the thing performers genuinely enjoy talking about afterwards.

6. 6

   Who on your crew has been with you longest, and what do they do?

   The answer names the people who make the work possible and are almost never asked about. It also tells you what she keeps steady while everything else changes shape every tour.

7. 7

   What did you learn in Destiny's Child that you still use?

   Group work teaches things solo work cannot: blending, sharing a microphone, arranging harmony on the spot. Asking what survived is more interesting than asking her to reminisce about the group.

8. 8

   How do you decide what makes an album and what stays unreleased?

   Artists at this level record far more than they release, and the editing is the real creative decision. Ask what a song has to do to survive the cut, and whether anything cut is still missed.

9. 9

   What does a producer do that makes you want to work with them again?

   This gets a working answer about collaboration rather than a list of names. The qualities she describes tell you what she is like in a room, which is not something anyone can describe about themselves directly.

10. 10

    What is the audition room like from your side of the table?

    She has spent decades on both sides of that door. What she looks for in a dancer or a musician is a rare piece of craft knowledge, and it is a question almost nobody thinks to put to her.

11. 11

    What was the last thing you changed the night before a tour opened?

    Late changes are where the standard lives. The specific item, a light cue, a transition, a costume change that took two seconds too long, tells you more about how she works than any general question about perfectionism.

12. 12

    What is the difference between singing in a studio and singing to a stadium?

    The honest answer covers physical technique, pacing across a set, and how much of a stadium performance is aimed at people who can only see a screen. It is a craft question that rewards a long answer.

13. 13

    Which video was the hardest to make, and what made it hard?

    Difficulty is usually logistical rather than artistic: water, heat, horses, a location with a two hour permit. This question tends to produce the best anecdotes in any interview, because the constraints are so specific.

14. 14

    What do you listen to that would surprise people?

    Standard as a question, but the follow-up is the useful part: ask when she listens to it. What an artist plays while doing something else says more about taste than anything they would name as an influence.

15. 15

    What do you do the day after a tour ends?

    The comedown after a year of shows is real and rarely described. It also treats her as a worker finishing a long project, which tends to get a more candid answer than a question about fame.

16. 16

    What advice did you get early that turned out to be wrong?

    Better than asking for advice, because it makes her the judge rather than the oracle. It usually leads to a story about a specific person and a specific moment when she decided to ignore it.

17. 17

    How do you decide when to say nothing?

    She has made silence part of how she releases work and how she handles a story. Asking about the decision rather than the mystery is respectful, and it gets closer to an answer than asking her to explain herself.

18. 18

    What do you want your children to take from watching you work?

    Ask about the work rather than motherhood in general, which is the version she has answered a hundred times. Watching a parent be extremely good at something is its own kind of inheritance.

19. 19

    What have you not made yet that you want to make?

    The future tense gets past the archive. Artists deep into a career often have an unrealised form in mind, a film, a stage production, a record nobody expects, and this is the question that opens it.

20. 20

    What do you wish someone would ask you that nobody does?

    Save it for the end. By then she knows what kind of conversation this is, and the answer is either the best moment of the interview or a graceful close, and either one is fine.