Here’s Why Kandi Burruss Has Writing Credits on Ariana Grande’s ‘Break up with Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored’
If there is one thing for certain, it’s that The Real Housewives of Atlanta star Kandi Burruss will always keep a check. She makes a good amount of her money due to music royalties from her extensive career as a songwriter. On the heels of getting a writing credit on Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You,” she also has a recent pop hit by Ariana Grande on her resume as well.
‘break up with your girlfriend, I’m bored’ is one of Ariana Grande’s biggest hits
Grande released “break up with your girlfriend, I’m bored” as the third single from her fifth studio album, thank u, next. The music video for the single dropped on February 8, 2019, the same day that the album was released.
It debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, only blocked by another Grande single, “7 Rings.” The song marked Grande’s 13th top 10 song on the chart. She also became the first artist since The Beatles in 1964 to occupy the top three slots on the Hot 100.
Directed by Hannah Lux Davis, the music video co-starred Riverdale actor Charles Melton and model Ariel Yasmine.
Kandi Burruss wrote the song that Grande’s hit samples
“break up with your girlfriend, I’m bored” samples “Makes Me Ill,” a track taken from *NSYNC‘s 2000 album, No Strings Attached. Grande’s track specifically samples’ the song’s hook. Burruss wrote and produced the song with her frequent collaborator Kevin “She’kspere” Briggs.
In a 2019 interview with Billboard, Burruss talked about how she found out Grande wanted to sample the song how it got cleared. She explained that she’s known Grande’s manager, Scooter Braun, for many years.
“I’ve known her manager Scooter Braun for years, way before he became a manager, [back to] when he was an intern for Jermaine Dupri at So So Def,” she explained. “It’s crazy how things come full circle with people that you’ve worked with over the years. So he reached out to let me know that they had sampled the song and they wanted to work out the publishing split. You can imagine that I was super excited about it! I was really happy. I’m thankful to the writers.”
Here’s how she reacted to the track
Talking about her reaction, Burruss said, “[The label] had sent me a link to the song to hear it. I thought it was so dope. I would’ve never thought anybody would have sampled ‘It Makes Me Ill’ after all these years. I actually went and met with [“Break Up” co-writer Savan Kotecha] afterwards, who’s an amazing writer and producer.”
Burruss was actually sequestered while competing on Celebrity Big Brother when the song first came out, so she didn’t realize the song had come out until later.
She added, “That was one of my favorite songs that I did back in the day, but it never was an official single for *NSYNC. So you never really expect songs that weren’t the big single to really go on and do other things. But this is a major thing. I’m shocked! And to come out of the [Celebrity] Big Brother house after a month of being stuck in that house to another hit record is just…wow!”
