Thread: Ryan Seacrest Radio Interview About The Making of Just Stand Up

I found this on pulse-- I couldn't find a link, sorry. It is a snippet of a radio interview LA Reid did with Ryan Seacrest about the making of Just Stand Up. It seems that they picked the singers themselves, and they all agreed to do it--- they were not bidding to be on the song as wikipedia falsely claimed.


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Snippet of LA Reid interview talking about the making of "Just stand up"

Ryan Seacrest: Give me the premise on how this ["Just Stand Up"] all came together.

L.A. Reid: This is exciting. We had a meeting with Laura Ziskin and a group of ladies who came to the office really to solicit our help, to help pull off this telethon called "Stand Up To Cancer" and as we got into it and I really started to feel the impact that it had on these particular ladies, cancer, I'm talking about cancer, and the impact that it had on them and I really wanted to get involved. They wanted a donation. I said, 'Well, the record business is in really tough times now. We can make a contribution but it will be in music. And we'll sell a song for you and all the proceeds will go to your telethon.' But the idea more than that was really to try to reach people and touch people where they have pain due to cancer and other serious illnesses and things like that. So we came up with this idea to do a song and called all these girls and all the girls said yes.

These girls really got us excited. Kenny Edmonds (Babyface) as you know (is) my partner for many, many years and we actually haven't produced a record together in a long time but we promised each other to do it and we promised it on many, many occasions and everytime we were supposed to do it, I wouldn't show up to the studio because I really was afraid that it would be dated. I thought it might sound dated. It's easy to tell people when the record sounds good but when you have to actually make the record I didn't want to be judged. Anyway, we went in the studio and we talked and came up with this idea and came out with something that we're really proud of.

Ryan: How do you get all, I'm just looking at the names: Mary J., Mariah and Sheryl and Fergie, how do you get those girls to coordinate their effort for one song?

L.A.: Well, we called each one of them one at a time and everyone said yes. Everyone said yes they would do it. Now the logistics of getting everybody, oh my God, that was the nightmare! Getting people to say yes and to understand it was the easy. But we actually ended up recording each girl one at a time in different places. Kenny was flying all over the country. He really stood in the studio with everybody except Beyonce. We sent her the tapes. She did her part, sent it back to us.

Ryan: Did anybody have to do it again?

L.A.: No. There were people that we wanted to do it again to be honest. [Laughs]

Ryan: I know it's charity but can we get another take? [Laughs]