How are you?
I’m good. Pretty good.
Are you enjoying London?
London’s fantastic. It was beautiful last
night. I didn’t go anywhere – I was just
standing outside... I was gonna run
through Hyde Park at three in the morning.
But the big guy was scared (points to slab
of muscle body guard). He used the word
like creepy... It was too creepy! Which is
true, but when I want to run I want to run.
He was scared to go for a jog at three
o’clock in the morning (laughs).
So ‘The Blueprint 3’; how long have
you been recording it for?
Forever. My whole life. I must have
honestly started the process three or four
times. But it actually started out in the UK
when I was playing Manchester. Kanye
came along to my show and brought
me a CD full of beats and they were all
sequenced. So he’s like, “This is the
album!”, and I was, “Woah – slow down”.
Kanye thought it was done and ready. But
that was pretty much the foundation for
what would become ‘The Blueprint 3’.
Did you always know it was going to
be ‘The Blueprint 3’?
Yeah. I knew from day one.
And did you always intend to complete
the trilogy?
I had my last trilogy with the ‘....Lifetime’
volumes one, two and three and I’d
skipped over ‘The Blueprint’ for a bunch
of albums and I thought now was the
time. It would be very appropriate to go
back to it, you know? The first ‘Blueprint’
was a return to my roots. It was like the
soul samples that I grew up listening to.
This album sets the blueprint for the next
generation. We are becoming those icons
we looked up to – for this new generation,
kids look up to us that way. Me, Kanye,
Justin. I just wanted to return to making
music like that. I’m calling it a new classic.
The songs are really lush and I tackled
it without any formulas in mind. It just
needed to feel like classic music with new
subjects of course... I had all these big
records and all this success – with ‘The
Blueprint’ I had to take a step back to take
a step further.
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