In a sprawling new interview with Vulture, Big Sean opened up about the G.O.O.D. Music Wyoming sessions from summer 2018, when everyone on the label's roster was dropping 7-track albums. He explained why he didn't join the likes of Nas and Teyana Taylor in releasing his own abbreviated album.
“I just wasn’t feeling the vibe,” Sean said. “That’s no disrespect. I was loving the projects, but I just couldn’t get in the groove. That’s just something you can’t force. I thought Kids See Ghosts was crazy. I liked Teyana’s album. All the projects were very unique. But when it was time for me to really get in there on that, I guess I wasn’t inspired. I was going through things in my head that I was still working out. I wasn’t ready to be creative right then. When I tried to force it, I realized I’d be in the studio just beating a dead horse, listening to a beat over and over and over. It would start to get torturous. I was looking at it as a job: ‘You gotta get this amount of work done, or else.’ I was still more in an observant point, living through experiences in my life. I had to work my way back.”
Last year, Sean previewed one of his songs from those sessions, titled “Lucky Me,” which was never released.
Sean also touched on Kanye West’s divisive presidential campaign.
“Yeah. Who isn’t following it?,” the Detroit rapper said when asked if he was keeping track of Ye’s political career. “Kanye is my brother, so it’s like … there have been so many times where he says something people may have thought was crazy, and I’ve seen him execute it. I was there when he was in debt for millions. He believed in himself, and now he’s out of debt. He’s one of few billionaires in hip-hop. More than anything, more than a presidency, I just want my brother to be happy. That’s the goal.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Sean talked about the passing of his ex-girlfriend, Naya Rivera, who drowned in a lake in California in early July. The pair began dating in 2013 and were briefly engaged before breaking up in 2014. A few months later, Sean released the song “IDFWU,” which became the lead single from his 2015 album Dark Sky Paradise—and which many interpreted as a diss aimed at Rivera.
“That’s a tough question to answer because I’m still processing a lot of that,” Sean said when asked if he regretted making the song in wake of Rivera's death. “I don’t feel comfortable talking about it because I want to respect her. She’s made such an impact on people, and she’s done so many great things in her life and her career that it was hurtful to even have that [song] be associated with her. It wasn’t a diss to her. I truly made the song and played it for her. She knew about it, and she liked it. We had a breakup that was very public, and we were young and we forgave each other and moved on from that. If I would have known something this tragic would have happened, I would have never made the song.”
Sean also goes on to talk about his rumored beef with Kendrick Lamar. "That’s what happened. It was nothing," he said after the interviewer commended him for squashing rumors of the non-existent beef. "I didn’t even know what the fuck it was. We communicated to each other that it was all love. That’s what you’re supposed to do. It should never get to a point where you can’t communicate with someone, especially somebody who had been in my house before, somebody who I’ve been invited to their mama’s house, or somebody I’ve made music with that was fire."
Big Sean is gearing up to release his forthcoming album, Detroit 2 on Friday. In advance of the project’s arrival, the rapper has released singles “Deep Reverence” with Nipsey Hussle and “Harder Than My Demons." He's also teased a snippet of his Lil Wayne-featuring song “Don Life.”
