This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Artist News
James Blake collaborating with Kanye, Kanye collaborating with Rick Rubin
By Aly Barchi | Published on Tuesday 17 June 2014
Time now for a spate of somewhat vague pseudo-news starring James Blake and Kanye West, who’ve been relaying minimal info on their respective new solo LPs.
James Blake’s is possibly going to feature West, as it happens, and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and another secret artist he declined to name in this recent Billboard interview. Speaking on the TBC third record, which will follow 2013’s ‘Overgrown’, Blake said: “Every song is about 50% done. I’m getting there”, adding: “It’s hard to say what will end up on the record, but it’s exciting. I’ve had a completely different life since the first album. I’ve had a lot more freedom since the first album too. The [album] I’m writing now, I’ve had more focus doing this than I have before. I’m having more fun”.
As for Kanye(ezy), he’s been collaborating with Rick Rubin again, as per ‘Yeezus’, on his seventh LP. Chatting idly with BBC Radio 1’s Zane Lowe in an interview that aired yesterday, Rubin first reminisced on how his work on ‘Yeezus’ began, telling Lowe: “He originally came over and said ‘I wanna come play you my new album’ and I thought we’d be listening to a finished album. Then we listened to about three hours of music, most of which didn’t have vocals, and at the end I was like ‘wow, so what’s it gonna be?’ I’m thinking it’s a year away and he was like ‘well, I’m putting it out in like five or six weeks'”.
The producer went on: “It was just a funny conversation because it was completely normal to him, it’s just the way he works… today, Kanye West is coming in and we’re starting looking at vocal ideas for things for the next album”.