Fetty Wap recently sat down with Billboard to share how his hit 2014 song “Trap Queen” came together and to reflect upon the continued success of the track and how it introduced the world to “the kid with the one eye from Paterson.”
In the How It Went Down episode, which you can watch above, Fetty Wap recalls that when he first wrote the song, he was living in Paterson, New Jersey and it was a freezing cold winter day.
“We didn't really have much furniture in the house, and I was sitting on the floor and I was going through this website called SoundClick.com,” he says. When one of the beats stood out to him, he knew right away that he had to do something “crazy” with it. So he started thinking about everything he was going through at the time and he put it all into a song.
Before he went to the studio to record “Trap Queen,” Fetty Wap met up with his friend Nitt Da Gritt at Eastside Park. As soon as Nitt Da Gritt heard the beat, he said they had to set up a studio session, and a week later, they hit the studio with Brian “Peoples” Garcia (who Fetty Wap calls “Peeps”).
In the video, Fetty Wap also reveals that there was originally a different version of the song, and he notes that because “Trap Queen” was only the third song he had ever written, he didn’t really know how to write songs yet. “Once I went through the first verse, it was originally just supposed to be a verse, and a hook and that's all I had. I didn't really have too much left.”
“I loved the original one more than the one that everybody else know, that's on the album,” he continues. “The original one is…three of the same verses, but it's just so much more energy to that one because that's the original.”
He adds that once the song came out, people reacted instantly, wanting to know who he was. “And now…years later,” he says, “Everybody know the kid with the one eye from Paterson, Fetty Wap.”
Check out the video above to hear the full story of how "Trap Queen" was written.
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