Beyonce marks 45th birthday and remastered album release

Beyonce will be celebrating her birthday and the remastered release of her coming-of-age second album B’DAY.

B’DAY, released in 2006, was Beyoncé’s first visual album, with short films that explored the making of a relationship in full.

It was a conceptual project, exploring themes of finding one’s confidence, liberation, audacity and compatibility.

The album, featuring popular singles Green Light, Get Me Bodied and Upgrade U was augmented by Beyoncé’s insistence on live instrumentation.

“I wanted the album to be big, percussive, hard, up-tempo, and energized, and it was important to me that we used live instrumentation,” she recalled.

Beyonce continued, “Hip-hop was taking over at the time, but I was fighting to preserve the bridges, melodies, and harmonies that have always been at the heart of R&B.”

“The goal was to blend those two worlds through the art of sampling. I loved the minimalism of a beautiful vocal arrangement over a simple drum loop or a classic guitar like ‘Irreplaceable’…but only if that 808 was banging underneath,” she added of her album B-DAY.

In preparing for this milestone release, Beyonce once again went back to the boards and worked on remastering songs.

The videos, originally captured on 35mm are now remastered and re-coloured and finished in 4k, including Déjà Vu featuring JAY-Z, and directed by Sophie Muller, which was also released today.