There's still a lot of Frank Ocean's music that was made and has not been released or heard, according to one Frank Ocean collaborator. Billy "Spaceman" Patterson was listed in the credits for both of Ocean's two recent albums, his visual album, Endless, and the independently released Blonde that dropped a couple of days later.
"There's a lot of stuff that we recorded that I still haven't heard yet," Spaceman admitted to Pitchfork. "So the whole thing was, 'What's going to show up on the record?' I was talking to Om'Mas and I was saying, 'Do we know?' And he said, 'We'll know when it comes out.' And when he dropped Endless, I thought that was it. And then, boom, a couple of days later, Blonde. 'Oh, those songs! I remember them. We recorded a lot of music."
The guitarist, who has worked with an impressive lineup of musicians from Miles Davis to Sly Stone and the Bomb Squad, had multiple credits on each of the projects where he played both acoustic and electric guitar and guitar synth. He's credited on "In Here Somewhere," "Rushes," and "Deathwish (ASR)" on Endless. When it comes to Blonde, he says he contributed to "Nights," "Skyline To," "Seigfreid," "Ivy," "Pink & White," as well as possibly "Pretty Sweet," and "Close to You."
It turns out Spaceman worked on a lot of music together. "We had like 14-hour, 15, 16-hour sessions," he revealed before diving into the process of creating music with Ocean. "We're creating continually. So something may happen, and [Frank might] say, 'Oh, that’s nice, let’s try this here.' So it winds up becoming a thing, and then I wind up doing a lot of different kind of textures." The guitarist also claimed he never knew exactly which project they were working on at any one time. "It wasn’t defined: 'OK, this is Endless,' or ‘'this is Boys Don’t Cry or Blonde' or whatever the working titles were. I call it just one giant, long record."
Thankfully, it turns out Beats 1 hero Zane Lowe took a spontaneous trip to Tokyo to interview Frank Ocean earlier this month, so it looks like we might get some much needed answers about his two projects in the near future.
