It's widely accepted that Jay Z's 4:44 is one of the best albums of the year, complete with some truly breathtaking visuals and a career-spanning tour featuring a ton of classic moments. If we want to take a few words from a recent Jay interview and stretch them to their maximum possible meaning, we could have ourselves reasonably convinced that even more new Jay music is in the works.
"A lot of times I have ideas," Jay said during a discussion with Thomas Rhett and Jesse Frasure for the Tennessean. "Right now I have a bunch of ideas, and if I hear a track that I like, I'll say, 'This idea goes really well with that,' and I'll flesh it out with the actual track." Jay added that he considered himself a "great collaborator," recalling the sessions that resulted in the 4:44 track "Caught Their Eyes" featuring Frank Ocean.
"You just gotta keep doing it, and it has to be natural and it can't be some quirky thing we put together just because," Jay said when talking genre-hopping collabs. "We gotta keep playing festivals together and going to each other's concerts and collaborating and creating partnerships and pushing this message forward because it's where everything is heading."
Jay and Rhett both expressed support of blurring or outright ignoring unspoken genre limitations. Elsewhere in the interview, Jay touted the importance of seeing the "invisible" similarities between seemingly contradictory artists. "All these topics are how we grow, how we come together because now I understand a bit more about you and you understand a bit more about me and we start realizing we have more similarities," he said. "We realize that all of things that separate us are just really surface things. All of the invisible things are what's important."
Though Jay has "ideas" floating around, his recent track record shows we definitely shouldn't expect a new full-length project to drop anytime soon. There were four long years between Magna Carta… Holy Grail and 4:44. Be patient.
