They say if you’ve got it, flaunt it, and Beyoncé Knowles definitely knows how to shake what her momma gave her.She’s made millions doing it -- $87-million a year, according to Forbes magazine’s recent calculation – and the woman who helped inspire and enhance the star’s considerable assets, her mother, remains at the center of it all.
“It’s been an amazing run,” the Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles, said. The marathon that is her daughter’s career shows no sign of stopping any time soon.
Her famous daughter has collected a baker’s dozen Grammy Awards and this weekend is in Las Vegas to wrap up her North American “I am… Yours” tour with a quartet of intimate shows at Encore Theater.
“She’s really looking forward to the intimacy of this,” Knowles said. “It’s a different show from her ‘I am… (Yours)’ tour, completely different, … (and) she’s very excited about being able to do songs that she doesn’t get to do on the show regularly.”
“This is more like an intimate, heartfelt something that she doesn’t get to do every day,” she explained. “She’s changed things up and it’s going to (have) a lot of fun surprises.”
The matriarch’s smile is detectable even as she speaks over the phone. While her cell phone cuts in and out of range as she and her grandson wind their way through the aisles of a Los Angeles bookstore, her mother’s pride remains clear.
“She has worked so hard,” she says of her daughter’s recent efforts to tailor and perfect the performance that she has been giving in arenas across the country for the 1,500-seat Encore Theater. “She’s putting it together as she goes along so it’s been a really big challenge.”
“I think as of Sunday they had worked 14 days in a row preparing for this,” she said of the crew.The four-night engagement will provide fans with an up-close and personal look at the superstar. In addition to the scaled-down size of venue, the set list and show itself have been reworked and are totally unique.
“It’s a totally different show,” Knowles asserted, which means the band had to learn new songs and back-up dancers had to learn new choreography.Not that fans should expect Beyoncé to abandon her material and turn the Encore showroom into a cover song-filled cabaret.
“They’re all her songs,” Knowles assured. “She has so many songs she (only) does a fraction of them on tour … (but) she’s going to get to do them on this show.”It would seem that when it comes to songs that she loves to sing, Beyoncé suffers from too much of a good thing.“She has a lot of hits,” Knowles said, chuckling as she concluded, “That’s a good problem to have.”Knowles is humble and gracious despite both her and her daughter’s success.“I feel very blessed,” she said when asked about her daughter’s megastar status.While Knowles is understandably thrilled by Beyoncé’s accomplishments, it seems that it her daughter’s down-to-Earth demeanor that she seems most proud of.“She’s very, very talented but also a nice person,” she insisted. “I feel very blessed to be a part of … all the challenges and the accomplishments.”
