While he may have dropped his seventh studio album, The Life of Pablo, last year, Kanye West practically dropped an EP worth of material with the one and only Paul McCartney. In total, the unlikely pair released three tracks: “Only One,” “FourFiveSeconds,” and “All Day.” When asked by REVOLT last year about working with the Beatle, ‘Ye said, “He’s amazing. He’s a genius.” Now, over a year removed from the string of collaborations, the former Beatle expounded on their chemistry at a recent Mastertapes session at the BBC.
Referring to Kanye as “a monster,” McCartney told the audience, “I love Kanye, people say he’s eccentric which you would have to agree with but he is a monster… he is a crazy guy who comes up with great stuff.”
As far as how they started working together, the McCartney said it started with a simple request. “Someone said, ‘Kanye wants to write with you.’ So I thought about it first, do I want to do this? I thought, Yeah of course I do. And if it doesn’t work, we just wouldn’t tell anyone … that was the agreement,” he shared.
Upon working together, the two mostly sat around coming up with different melodies and chords as Kanye, as McCartney recalls, recorded on his iPhone. Months went by after their initial work together, and out of nowhere McCartney says “FourFiveSeconds” and “All Day” appeared in his inbox. “I said ‘Where am I?’” McCartney recalled, while asking about “FourFiveSeconds.” “[Kanye] says, ‘We sped you up!’ In the middle of the record, there’s a little voice that goes, ‘I find a mystery’ That’s me! I loved it!”
Perhaps one of the most interesting bites, McCartney also revealed that Oprah Winfrey warned him about not being associated with Kanye’s “All Day” track due to the many “Ni**a” is mentioned. “People like Oprah, who’s a little conservative about that stuff, said, ‘You shouldn’t do it, even black people shouldn’t use that word. I said, ‘Yeah, but it’s Kanye,” McCartney said. “And he’s talking about an urban generation that uses that word in a completely different way.’ It’s the context. So I was actually pleased with it.”
As for his work on the track, McCartney said the melody was inspired by Pablo Picasso painting of a guitarist. “I thought, what’s that chord he’s playing. I started trying to write something just using two fingers and whistled the melody. I was telling that to Kanye … and he didn’t really appear to notice. But then after Christmas, I get this track back, and he took my melody and made it seriously urban.”
The full segment can be heard, right here.