Last summer, Jay-Z delivered his most personal album to date, 4:44. One of the tracks on the album was a song by the name of “Smile,” which finds Jay-Z discussing the moment his mother Gloria Carter came out to him. On the song, he says that he cried when his mom told him.
“Imagine having lived your life for someone else,” he says. “And you think you’re protecting your kids. For my mother to have to live as someone that she wasn’t and hide and like, protect her kids — and didn’t want to embarrass her kids, for all this time. And for her to sit in front of me and tell me, ‘I think I love someone.’ I mean, I really cried. That’s a real story. I cried because I was so happy for her that she was free.”
Watch Jay-Z discuss the moment below. Watch the whole interview on Netflix’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction on Friday (April 6).