Beyonce Marks a B'Day Anniversary With Morning Dew (Donk)

Beyonce opened the July 4 holiday with a song rather than a post. Morning Dew (Donk) begins a sixty day countdown to the anniversary of B'Day, the album she released in September 2006, which is being reissued this year with the new track on it.

Who made it

The writing credits go to Beyonce, Pharrell Williams, The-Dream and Darius Dixon, with Beyonce and Williams producing. It arrived with a lyric video directed by Cliff Watts built from repurposed footage, and the whole look of it plays as an acknowledgement of the fans who have been waiting.

What it is actually about

On the surface the song is playful and heavy on innuendo, and the title is not a weather report. Underneath that it reads as a study of a long relationship, and specifically of a couple who have been together long enough to spend their evenings watching films at home and still find the spark intact.

The school imagery makes the point. She sings about wanting to go back to school with a locker full of pictures of him, and about earning an A in biology with graduation approaching. Elsewhere she describes something in the way he looks at her that produces the feeling of young love.

Read that way it is less a provocation than a marriage song written by someone who has been in one for a long time.

The reissue

B'Day turns twenty this September. Adding a new song to a reissue is a familiar move, but pairing it with a countdown gives the campaign a shape, and it puts a Pharrell Williams production at the centre of an album he did not originally work on.