Beenie Man Shares How Shaggy’s Classic ‘Angel’ Inspired His New Song ‘Good Like Gold’

Beenie Man said that when he penned the lyrics for Good Like Gold from his Grammy-nominated album Simma, he was determined that Dancehall megastar Shaggy’s voice had to be on it.

According to Beenie, Good Like Gold‘s lyrics have a similar theme to that of Shaggy’s 2001 mega-hit Angel, and, additionally, its beat is also a makeover of that song’s riddim.

“The beat is a remake of Angel enuh.  A di same beat.  Suh mi just guh fi it.  Mi jus guh fi Shaggy neck man. Mi nuh know weh him waan sing, but him haffi sing dis.  The song was written by me anyway,” Beenie explained during an interview with Radio Jamaica’s Two Live Crew hosts Dahlia Harris and Christopher “Johnny” Daley, who described Simma, as a “collector’s item”. 

Good Like Gold is a refreshing track with Shaggy’s Baritone voice complementing Beenie Man’s multi-octave vocal range, on the happy, bouncy beat, which has a memorable hook. 

Angel, which appeared on Shaggy’s Hot Shot album, remains a go-to for wedding playlists to this day, and was the 17th most successful song of 2001 in the U.S., selling just under 1.5 million copies in that country by April 2016.

Regarded as one of Shaggy’s bestselling songs of all time, Angel, which was produced by Shaun “Sting” Pizzonia, ascended to No. 1 in 12 countries, including the United Kingdon, Australia, and the United States. 

In the US, Angel debuted at No. 81 on the Billboard Hot 100.  It spent one week atop the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed on the chart for 28 weeks.   

Angel, which features Rayvon, is an interpolation of the lyrics of the Evie Sands original 1967 song Angel of the Morning, which was written by American singer and songwriter Chip Taylor, and which has also been recorded numerous other times by various singers, among them Merrilee Rush and Juice Newton.

In a Billboard interview, which was published in April 2021, Shaggy, after being asked about the genesis of Angel, had explained that the beat was a remake of Steve Miller Band’s 1973 Classic Rock song, The Joker, and pointed out that the bass component of that Rock beat was in fact Reggae.

“DJ Paul, who used to play at the Club Illusion in Brooklyn, was a really good friend with my longtime producer Sting International. He actually made a suggestion of interpolating Steve Miller Band’s 1973 song The Joker,” Shaggy had explained.

“So that bass — doom-doom, do-do-doom-doom — is actually a reggae bassline even though it’s from a rock song.  It just had that groove that made you want to put your arms around it,” he said.

With respect to the lyrics Shaggy had said that: “myself and Dave Kelly had already written one verse. While we were playing it, RikRok actually walked in singing that melody. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s dope’. We ended up just flipping the words and making it cooler by saying ‘peeps’ and ‘shorty’. That was the slang that was going on at the time.”

“I ended up finishing the second verse and the bridge with RikRok. That made me realize we had a special record,” he added. 

Songwriter and singer RikRok, known particularly for his feature on Shaggy’s It Wasn’t Me, is quoted in Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book Of Number 1 Hits, as saying that he came up with the idea of combining Angel Of The Morning with the bassline from The Joker, after becoming exasperated during the composition process.

“Out of frustration, I started humming anything that came into my head,” he had said.

His revelation saw Shaggy concurring, saying, according to the publication: “He was fooling around and sang, ‘You’re my angel in the morning,’ and we knew we should use that. So we changed the words to make it a little harder, and I came up with the melody for the verse. All of us put words to it, and later on, Ricky finished the end part”.