Timbaland sat down for a panel discussion tonight for the 2023 Pop Conference at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. In a group that included Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, and Take a Daytrip, Timbaland took some time to discuss the creation of the Aaliyah classic “Are You That Somebody,” breaking down samples and inspirations that informed the song’s creation.

Appearing via video on a screen behind the other speakers, Timbaland listened to a play-through of “Are You That Somebody” and laughed at Take a Daytrip’s mention that a hook from Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby” was inspired by a scene from Shrek 2. “I actually was trying to make the Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory beat from the ‘Oompa-Loompa’ song,” he said, before singing the hook from the Wonka original. “I took that rhythm and I listened back to it and I was like, ‘Man that’s a dope addition.’ That’s what I was trying to attempt, but in a hip-hop way.” He added: “I gotta thank Willy Wonka for that.”

He also discussed some of the individual components that went into the song, including a sampled single guitar chord from the Meters that he ultimately utilized for one of the song’s central melodies. He also discussed the iconic baby noise pulled from a ’60s sound effects record, which he called “the missing piece of the whole beat to me.”

The baby part was me going through my sounds. I feel like life is full of music. As soon as you wake up, hearing the trees, that’s music. Hearing the crickets, that’s music. I feel like everything that we do is music. When you come outside, listen to the trees, the birds, the crickets, the animals, they all make music. So that’s always been my thing because we didn’t have money when I was growing up, so how could you make music? And my thought was how do you get your gift out when you don’t have the necessary tools to do it? So I always pulled on nature, ’cause I pulled on buckets, spoons, cans to make my beats because I couldn’t afford a drum machine, so I never dialed away from nature, because nature molded who I am today. I always wanted to use nature to be in my songs, just things that we see every day, things that we hear every day.

So I was going through my effects sounds, and I heard this baby. Was it a baby, was it a chicken, there was a cow, there was Godzilla, this whole row. And this baby came across, and it was laughing, and that [one sound] wasn’t the whole thing. It was like [imitates four consecutive baby giggles]. I got to that one part, and as soon as the beat came on, I just hit the button. I didn’t think it was gonna work. I was talking to Aaliyah from where she was sitting on the couch, and I just hit the button and it was in key. Everything was perfect. I put it in the song and she said, “Oh that’s so cute!”

Aaliyah’s full discography arrived to streaming platforms, though it came amid a dispute between the late singer’s estate and the label. Barry Hankerson, the founder of label Blackground and Aaliyah’s uncle, has promised that a posthumous album called Unstoppable is in the works. The Weeknd and Aaliyah song “Poison” was released last year.