Ok so yesterday we had GOOD Music in-house producer Hit Boy break down the time he heard “Niggas In Paris” from Watch The Throne for the first time mixed, mastered and completed for the first installment of “Talk 2 Me.” And today, we’re going to stick with the GOOD Music formula and tap into the creative mind of singer/songwriter Tony Williams. While Late Registration was released over 5 years ago, the music still resonates to this very day. And who DOESN’T love a good studio tale about one of their favorite tracks? I know I DO! Ladies and gentlemen, WE MAJOR!

LowKey: Talk To Me about the recording session for Kanye West’s “We Major” featuring you, Nas and Really Doe!

Tony Williams: Paul Wall was in the building as well. We utilized the upstairs room at Record Plant in L.A., so he could track his verse for “Drive Slow”, which by the way, I layered vocals on.  But looking back, i guess my thumbprint was all across Late Registration.  That album process, in my opinion, was by far the most exciting of all the albums…. there was so much energy in the studio, on a daily basis. There was so much creative firepower around, that the potential for magic was always a possibility. That was the same day that Nas came in to lay his verse.

Anyway, Ye had been entertaining the idea of utilizing the track which he had gotten from Warryn Cambell, a few weeks prior.  Tinkering with new drums was amongst the 47 other projects that he had taken on over those last few days.  That’s how we work, always several things at once- biting off small components of several songs, while waiting on something to take shape, to slowly evolve until it screams out, “I’m a song now.”  I remember somebody in the room saying, “I don’t think this track is gonna make the cut, why are we still messin’ with it”.

We pretty much work 15- 18 hour days when we record an album.  That’s why it freaks me out when I work with a producer that starts to fade after about 4 or 5 hours, which happens all the time.  And we do it for several weeks straight.  Kanye will usually get to the studio about 11 am or so and start tweaking on his ideas after having had a few hours sleep to dream about them.  I’d arrive early when he did and maybe sketch out ideas for hooks, but I always record vocals at night.   Frequently, during that album I’d be the last one in the studio, just me and the engineer til the wee hours of the morning.  It was kinda’ like assembly line work.

It was in the afternoon, this particular time, so there wasn’t a tremendous amount of traffic throughout the halls at Record Plant. Normally, we would start slow and then pick up creative steam by 7 or 8 o’clock in the evening.  Plain Pat, Ibn, Don C., Really Doe and I think GLC where all in the building.  We were in the big room, the first one on the left side of the hallway that morning and it seems like Nas and Paul Wall got to the studio within minutes apart and we knew that today, it was going DOWN, something’ was! Afterwards, we all just sat and kicked it for a while than we started playing the track.  We never force sessions.  We let them happen and at this point all we had was a track- no hook, no melodies, no concepts, no nothing… just a track.

I remember ,Ye, at the time was in the room across the hall working on beats and Nas, Really Doe, GLC, and I sat at the board in the big room sketching out verse concepts.  An hour or so later, Really Doe was in the booth laying a verse he had come up with.  I remember thinking, “man, that verse is crazy”.  By now, Kanye was in the room with us.  At that point, we really didn’t even have a basic structure for the song, so we tried to figure out how Doe’s verse would fit into the grand scheme of things.  So we just kept listening to it over and over… and over and over and over …. and over.  That’s when Ye said, “… Man, this verse is so crazy, we can’t just hear it only once, this has GOT to be the hook.  And so there it was.  That’s what got the whole ball rollin’ on that song-Doe’s verse.

Crazy!!  And to think that Paul Wall’s verse on Drive Slow was going down, simultaneously, upstairs.  Meanwhile, Nas hadn’t even hit the booth, yet.  Now, we had some direction, some momentum…  it was easy.  After another hour or so, Nas’ verse was done and the vibe in the room was like 90′s bulls after game 6 of the playoffs, “we got another one.”

My job on that joint was simple.  I’m just the icing on the cake.  By that evening, I was over on the other side of the hall in the room with Ye vibing on ideas for the topping.  Frequently, Ye and I will come up with melody ideas together.  I remember him expressing,  “We need something that feels like some Earth, Wind and Fire shit”.  And you know thats all day with me.  I remember singing that melody line and us trying for an hour or two to find words to fit into those beginning ba dap bop pahhhhh’s before the “feeling better than I ever…….”  It’s funny how we sometimes overthink things.  Finally, Kanye surrendered to the idea that perhaps the answer was simply Ba dap bop pahhhhhh…..  and so it was.  I wrote the rest of the vamp and had it recorded around  midnight.  The studio was totally alive by now.

I remember Kanye starting to write on his verse that same night, but it was probably the next day or so that he had finished recording it.   The reprise at the end of the record after his rant, “Can I talk my shit again” happened somewhere around post production.  I never heard that part of the song, all the “i gotta say wasp to Tony Williams” and all that.  The complete song as a whole to me was new and fresh when i leaked the record at K-104 in Dallas on the morning show.  They played all 5 or 6 minutes of it too.  All these years later, people still “gotta say wassup’ to Tony Williams.”

I GOTTA say wassup to Tony Williams for coming through on Talk 2 Me. Oh, by the way….UHTN is presenting his next piece of work. You’ve been warned!