2015Released
5:00

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about These Walls. By Songfacts®.

The titular walls have two different meanings here. The sugar walls are a vagina euphemism (previously used by Prince for a song he penned for Sheena Easton) and Lamar offers various sexual innuendoes where he is enjoying himself physically with a woman. There are also real walls, which are obstacles to the woman. Her lover is the same man that killed K-Dot's homie, Dave, whom he rapped about on "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst." The woman's lover is serving a life sentence, and she eases her pain at the separation by having sex with a famous rapper – one Kendrick Lamar.

Lamar receives vocal assistance from neo soul singer Bilal and Sonnymoon's Anna Wise on the track. Wise previously sang on Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d city track "Real" and is also featured on "Institutionalized." K-Dot originally discovered Wise on the internet through a YouTube video of the Sonnymoon song "Nursery Boy." She was on a road trip with her bandmate Dane Orr when the Compton rapper first contacted her in 2011. Wise recalled to Billboard magazine: "We were texting back and forth, and then we just decided to reroute our road trip down to Compton. Dane and I showed up maybe like a week later, and we lived there in the houses they had set up at the time, the recording studio - we just stayed there and we worked for like, many, many weeks in a row. It was really cool." As soon as we entered the room," she added, "we just knew that it was going to work out between us creatively - like love at first sight, but creatively."

Bilal, who contributed to six different To Pimp a Butterfly tracks, told Billboard about his creative process with Lamar. "A lot of this is Kendrick's genius," he said. "He kept speaking about having a big sound, a Parliament type of thing. And I'm all about that because George Clinton is my favorite artist. For a lot of the material, Kendrick had a sketch idea of what he wanted. He would sing out the melody and some of the words, and I would just interpret what he was telling me. On the songs where I added backing vocals, some of it was freestyle; just adding color to make it a fuller sound."

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Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of These Walls.
C♯Key
MajorMode
4/4Time Signature
108BPM

Album

The album These Walls is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released These Walls.
Aftermath
© 2015 Aftermath/Interscope (Top Dawg Entertainment)
℗ 2015 Aftermath/Interscope (Top Dawg Entertainment)

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