Will.i.am says that U2 was a big inspiration for the Black Eyed Peas hit song ‘I Gotta Feeling’ and actually inspired its chorus.
The American rapper and singer, whose real name is William Adams Jr., sat down with Nile Rodgers on the Apple Music podcast ‘Deep Hidden Meaning’ to talk about the inspiration behind the iconic 2009 track.
“What would U2 do?”
“David Guetta had this song called ‘Love Is Gone’… So he sends me the remix to ‘Love Is Gone’ and that is the beat to ‘I Gotta Feeling’,” the artist recalled. “I approached it like, ‘Ok, if I could approach the chorus what would Earth, Wind & Fire do? What would U2 do? What would Talking Heads do all at the same time?”
“The chorus is like an Earth, Wind & Fire type of vibe, it’s very Maurice White. Then the ‘Woo-hoo‘ is very Bono.”
“Oh man, if they have another song like ‘Beautiful Day’ that’d be awesome.”
“U2. As a matter of fact, I wrote the chorus for U2 because at the time I was working on [U2’s 2009 album] ‘No Line On The Horizon’ at Olympic Studios in the UK. At the time ‘Beautiful Day’ was like, ‘Oh man, if they have another song like ‘Beautiful Day’ that’d be awesome.’ And so I did ‘I gotta feeling that tonight’s going to be a good night’ as a response to that,” the ‘Lets Get It Started’ singer added.
Will.i.am, now 49 years old, continued saying he wrote the hit song “from the perspective of Maurice White and then the Talking Heads’ ‘Psycho Killer’. And so that “Psycho Killer qu’est-ce que c’est?“. Let me borrow that. Let me use that math.”
‘I Gotta Feeling’ was a worldwide success, debuting at number two on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, second only to another track from their LP ‘Boom Boom Pow’, making the group one of only eleven artists to have occupied the top two spots at the same time.
The song spent 14 consecutive weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 making it the longest-running number one single in 2009.
As of June 2019 the track had sold over nine million downloads in just the US and also held the record as the most downloaded song on the iTunes Store of all time.
