Mike Will Made-It sat down with Cadence Weapon at the Red Bull Music Academy for a lecture, and he chatted about his unlikely crossover collabs with none other than Miley Cyrus and Bey. “When everyone expects you to zig, you zag with the Miley thing,” Cadence initially said to Mike.

He agreed. “2012, I was like ‘okay’, I had to start handling my business, ‘cos I’m broke as hell,” Mike recalled. He had a meeting with Jimmy Iovine, who told him that he needed to make hip-hop music pop. “He was like, ‘Dr. Dre was pop. Tupac was pop. Kanye’s pop. Pharrell was pop. And they still kept their sound. Everything on pop radio sounds the same right now and you have a sound that’s defining enough to [change] it.'”

Mike initially produced “We Can’t Stop” and “Pour it Up” with Rihanna in mind but, when that fell through, he thought of Miley. After an interview with RCA, who signs Miley, the unlikely duo became a reality.

Another iconic moment in his career would have had to come from Bey, of course. She’d reached out to him to send him some music. When he was playing some beats around with Swae Lee, Swae started saying “okay, now let’s get in formation”. From that moment, they knew they were onto something for Bey. Mike said he felt a bit out of the loop once he’d shown Bey the tune, as she was filming her Lemonade film and everything had to be tight-knit. But what was his response when he saw her perform “Formation” at the Super Bowl? “She broke the internet. She broke the fucking cable.”

It’s a really worthwhile, albeit long, interview. Check it out in the gallery above.