When Beyoncé's surprise self-titled album touched down last month, a minor mystery quickly shot out from the forest of the album’s liner notes. Among the usual suspects—Timbaland, the-Dream, Pharrell, Hit-Boy—someone by the name "Boots" was everywhere on the record. He wrote and produced "Haunted", "Heaven", and, perhaps most strikingly, "Blue", the song dedicated to Beyoncé and Jay Z's daughter. He sang backup vocals on and performed many or all of the instruments on several songs. In an interview, Beyoncé name-checked him as "an innovator," while a member of her creative team
tweeted the only currently available picture of Boots, with the note that he had “co-produced 80 percent of the album.” Within seven days, the query "Who is Boots?" had racked up 452,000,000 Google results.
So who is Boots? When I meet him at a Brooklyn restaurant down the street from his apartment, I have already agreed to some ground rules: I can't ask about his real name—even though Complex, The Broward Palm Beach New Times, and now even his freshly-minted Wikipedia page identify him as Jordy Asher, a Miami-based musician who spent time in a number of rock bands, including Blonds. He doesn't want to talk about any of the projects he's worked on before now. And he's cagey about how, exactly, Beyoncé discovered his demo, saying only, "That's for Beyoncé and me to know.”
But Boots isn't trying to be coy, just practical: Turns out that having the celebrity-hunting industrial complex descend upon you en masse can be terrifying. “When the album came out, people were calling my parents’ house within days," he tells me. "A dude was trying to sell pictures of me—just crazy shit that I’m not trying to bring into my life. It got rabid for a second. I know the information is going to get out there at some point; I’m not stupid. But I don’t know that I want to be the one to just hand it over to everyone. It can become a weird world real quick.”
