Kanye West has worked with a ton of great collaborators over the years, including everyone from Jon Brion to DJ Toomp. But we were super excited to hear he's been working with living legend Rick Rubin on Yeezus. The Def Jam co-founder is listed as an executive producer on the album. Today, Rubin spoke with The Wall Street Journal about working with Yeezy.
As expected, Rubin had some great insight and quite a few revelations. Rubin claimed that he was brought into the project just three weeks before it was due and Kanye played him three whole hours of partially finished pieces. According to Rubin, he initially felt like the records needed several more months of work but opted to sign up for the project anyway.
He went on to talk about Kanye's recording process saying:
We were working on a Sunday [the same day West attended a baby shower for girlfriend Kim Kardashian] and the album was to be turned in two days later. Kanye was planning to go to Milan that night. Five songs still needed vocals and two or three of them still needed lyrics. He said, “Don’t worry, I will score 40 points for you in the fourth quarter.” In the two hours before had to run out to catch the plane, he did exactly that: finished all lyrics and performed them with gusto. A remarkable feat. He had total confidence in his ability to get the job done when push came to shove.
Since the rumored tracklist for Yeezus has the album at only 10 songs long, that means half the songs weren't even fully recorded until the very last minute. Remarkable indeed.
If you read over to KanyeWest.com, you can actually catch a clip of Kanye recording "I Am God" with Rick Rubin sitting on the couch watching.
[via The Wall Street Journal]
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