Singer-turned-actress Mary J. Blige came up with the perfect song for her critically-acclaimed new movie Mudbound before she was even approached by director Dee Rees.
The No More Drama hitmaker portrays family matriarch Florence Jackson in the period drama, about two men who experience racism in rural Mississippi upon their return from World War II.
Mary also performs on the soundtrack for the Netflix movie, but she reveals Dee waited until filming had wrapped to ask the superstar to contribute to the music side of the project - and she was ready to dive back in.
"I didn't even know I was doing the song until after I saw it at Sundance (Film Festival in January (17)," she told Entertainment Weekly. "Then I was like, 'OK, I gotta write a song for this!' I was just waiting for Dee, for anybody, to ask me because I knew I had the song already. Then, I went to (producer) Raphael Saadiq with all (the) lyrics, on my phone of course, and we collaborated and came up with something even more special."
The result is Mighty River, a song about love and unity, and Mary knew it was perfect for the film.
"It was very, very powerful," she said. "It's really good and therapeutic to write a song like this for this movie, because when you watch the movie, all you see is the lyrics in this song. You just see every lyric. It's like, 'Come on, enough of this already! White flag in hand, I don't want to do this. I'm tired of doing this. Aren't you tired of doing this?' So, it was beautiful. It was just a very humbling moment to write a song like this with Raphael Saadiq, who I absolutely love, who I've been a fan of all my life. Just to work with him again means a lot."
Blige and Saadiq previously collaborated on I Found My Everything, which featured on her 2005 album The Breakthrough, and their recent reunion has helped Mary make history as the first performer in 10 years to land Golden Globe nominations for singing and acting. On Monday (11Dec17), the star was nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture for Mudbound, while Mighty River earned a nod for Best Original Song.
