"I'm producing Kanye's new album with Rick Rubin…That's coming up," Q-Tip told Elliott Wilson in a newly released interview filmed last month at Brooklyn's Barclays Center, where A Tribe Called Quest opened for West. (Q-Tip also said his fourth solo album, called The Last Zulu and originally announced in 2012, remains in the works.)
Back in June, last-minute Yeezus producer Rick Rubin hinted at a surplus of Kanye songs in an interview with Newsweek. "Initially, [Kanye] thought there were going to be 16 songs on the album," Rubin said. "But that first day, before he even asked me to work on it, I said, 'Maybe you should make it more concise. Maybe this is two albums. Maybe this is just the first half."
Q-Tip worked on Kanye's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in Hawaii, a "music by committee” experience he talked about with Complex in 2010. This summer, during a lecture at the New York Red Bull Music Academy, Q-Tip played a previously unheard rendition of Kanye track "Mama's Boyfriend," originally performed by Kanye at Facebook headquarters in 2011.
