Lil Nas X refuses to reveal how he got Kanye West to produce “Industry Baby,” his newly released track featuring Jack Harlow.
The Grammy-winning artist was asked about the Kanye contribution during a recent interview with Kerwin Frost, who simply asked how the collaboration happened.
“How did it happen?” X responded. “I actually can’t tell you. I can’t. Not yet, at least.”
When pressed about why he couldn’t share any details, X said it was “just a thing,” and that he wanted to “protect” his connections. He did, however, shed some light on his experience with Kanye, applauding the Donda rapper for his prolific, and ever-evolving career.
“We talked. He’s a pretty cool guy. Super down to earth. He’s super talented,” X continued. “He showed me stuff. He’s working on some great music. It’s nice to, uh, work with somebody who’s done that for so long, so much longevity and still going, you know?”
“He’s kind of, like, the height of outdoing yourself,” Frost said.
“Literally. And, like, constantly evolving,” X said. “Not even just evolving, but completely changing into something else … He’s always doing something different and new. Over and over and over again, recreating himself.”
“Industry Baby” hit streaming services last week, and is expected to appear on X’s long-awaited and highly anticipated debut studio album, Montero, which he says “is coming out one day.”
X shed some more light on what his forthcoming project will deliver, saying it would explore a wide range of topics and themes without being disjointed.
“It’s all connecting to one little world. It’s pretty cohesive,” he said. “It’s very much straight-forward, like OK, this Montero: This is how I feel about the future, about this past event, about this current thing going, this part of my love life, this part of family, this part of my career, you know? I really wanna let people to get to know Montero. It’s definitely deeper, but it still has it’s bops.”
Elsewhere in the interview, X spoke about his polarizing BET performance and how he was “terrified” as soon as he stepped onto the stage. He told Frost there was a malfunction during the gig, and then quickly realized that something had gone wrong during almost every one of his live performances.
“My AutoTune wasn’t working or something like that,” X recalled when asked about his BET gig. “And for the first 30 seconds or so or almost, I was like, ‘Oh my god. I wanna leave the stage right now,’ but I couldn’t. I’ve had history of things going terrible before [I go on] stage. Like my suit almost caught on fire at the VMAs. It was smoking and they had to cut my battery off … I had a wardrobe malfunction at the Grammys, when the back of my suit didn’t shut up. SNL, you know, almost my penis popped out … I feel like every performance, almost … I just realized, is there a performance where something didn’t happen?”
He paused for a few seconds before he thought of one smooth performance: “BET! BET actually went pretty great,” he said. “No. The AutoTune went out. But that’s OK!”
You can check out the full interview up top.
