Frank Ocean shook up the pop bubble last month by releasing Endless and Blonde in tandem, one of the rare moments in music that will be talked about for some time. With over 30 records in our possession after the dual release, it appears that Ocean is still holding on to a ton of more material in the vault.
In an interview with Pitchfork, guitarist Billy “Spaceman” Patterson, who contributed to both albums, revealed that his elusive collaborator is sitting on hours of unreleased material birthed out of their “14, 15, 16 hour sessions.”
“Our sessions are like, man, we had like 14-hour, 15-, 16-hour sessions,” said Patterson, before hinting that “There’s a lot of stuff that we recorded that I still haven’t heard yet.”
“We’re creating continually. So something may happen, and [Frank might] say, ‘Oh, that’s nice, let’s try this here.’ So it winds up becoming a thing, and then I wind up doing a lot of different kind of textures,” he said. The guitarist also mentioned that he was oblivious as to which project they were working on during the recording sessions. “It wasn’t defined [as] ‘OK, this is Endless,’ or ‘this is Boys Don’t Cry or Blonde‘ or whatever the working titles were,” he said. “I call it just one giant, long record.”
The news of this vast amount of records lying around should be no surprise. After all, Ocean has been working on the follow-ups to Channel ORANGE for over three years now. The journey to the making of the records may soon be told in an upcoming interview with Ocean, which was teased by Zane Lowe this week.
According to the BBC Radio 1 DJ turned creative director of Apple’s Beats 1 radio station, he flew to Tokyo last week to interview the reclusive maestro. “Frank and I have known each other for a few years. So he trusts me enough to get on FaceTime. But if [that interview] doesn’t work and it’s not coming together, there’s that moment where you have to ask yourself: ‘How badly do you want to deliver this for Frank, and for the audience?,” he told EveningStandard.
“Deciding within a few hours to jump on a plane for Tokyo to interview Frank Ocean, and getting the go-ahead from him by text — ‘Yeah, do it, get on a plane’ — and that’s all we have: we don’t have a time, we don’t have a location and there’s a freedom in that which makes it incredibly exciting to be working in this modern framework,” he shared.
This interview just became a top contender for ‘most anticipated.’