7 Seconds

7 Seconds is Youssou N'Dour's record first: a duet with Cherry released in June 1994 as the single from his album The Guide (Wommat). Two years later she added it to her own album Man. Booga Bear and Jonny Dollar produced it, and the European single credits Power Play Studios in Long Island City for the recording and Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound for the mastering. N'Dour sings in Wolof, French and English, Cherry in English.

On her website Cherry described it as being about a newborn child's first seven seconds of life, before it knows the world's troubles and violence. In 2012 she told SPIN she thought it was about tolerance and patience, and that N'Dour had played in her family's home in Sweden when he was 18. She told The Arts Desk that he came in the next day and took the song to another level, and The Independent that they had made it as an experiment. Her memoir tells the story again in a chapter called Seven Seconds Away.

Success

It topped the charts in France for 16 weeks, a record at the time, and in Italy, Switzerland, Finland, Iceland, Israel and Wallonia, reached the top three in Germany, Austria, Sweden, Ireland and Australia, and went gold across much of Europe. It won the MTV Europe award for Best Song in 1994. Larry Flick of Billboard found it unique and thoroughly pleasing, and it was included in 1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die. Stéphane Sednaoui shot the video in black and white in New York, with people of different ethnicities passing as the two sing.

setlist.fm counts 91 performances by 13 artists, 36 of them by Cherry and 30 by N'Dour. She sang it at Glastonbury in 1997, N'Dour called her on stage for it at WOMADelaide in 2015, and she sang it at Together For Palestine at Wembley in 2025 with Greentea Peng and Dan Smith. Lover's took a version to No. 4 in Spain in 1994, and Thomas D reworked it as Million Voices in 2010. The upload in the hypersongs web is the official video, directed by Sednaoui, in its shorter video length.