Aside perhaps from Adele, few musicians have mastered the balance between the public and the private, between familiarity and mystery, quite like Beyoncé. Interviews with the press are as rare as gold dust these days: she even declined to answer questions for the article accompanying her most recent US Vogue cover, in September 2015.
And yet this year’s visual album, Lemonade, was in many ways more exposing than any interview could ever hope to be. All those songs about adoring and despising a cheating partner prompted an international media scramble, as people tried to figure out whether she was actually referring to Jay-Z.
And in her latest music video, Queen B’s adoring public have been granted more intimate insights into her life behind the scenes.
The video for All Night dropped on Wednesday night, and it’s full of home video footage revealing glimpses of the ‘real’ Beyoncé – as well as clips of other couples and families.
Over the course of six minutes, we see the 35-year-old singer and her husband Jay-Z getting matching tattoos, together on their wedding day, and with their daughter Blue Ivy.
The evocative video begins with Beyoncé reading her grandmother’s recipe for lemonade: “Take one pint of water, add half pound of sugar, the juice of eight lemons, the zest of half a lemon. Pour the water from one jug then into the other several times. Strain through a clean napkin.”
“Grandmother, the alchemist, you spun gold out of this hard life. Conjured beauty from the things left behind. Found healing where it did not live,” Beyoncé continues.
“You passed these instructions down to your daughter who then passed it down to her daughter.”
The 35-year-old singer is also shown on the porch of a house in the Deep South surrounded by friends, collaborators and protégés, from actresses Amandla Stenberg and Quvenzhané Wallis to the singers Zendaya and Chloe and Halle.
You can watch the full video for All Night below. Tissues at the ready...
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