At this point, it’s no argument that Kendrick Lamar’s new album, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, has been a massive success. The album was the biggest debut on the Billboard charts so far this year, and it has scored Kendrick his first career number 1 on the R&B charts.
Since the massive release, there’s been interviews with many of the collaborators who show up on the album. DJ Dahi, a producer on much of the project, recently did an interview with Rolling Stone and had some interesting things to say, especially about the song “Count Me Out.”
According to Dahi, he originally had no intention of putting the song on Mr. Morale. “It’s funny because originally that piece of music was actually for my album,” he said of “Count Me Out.” He went on to describe how the song was generated: “That was from a jam session that I had done with my guys, Eli and Danny, Danny McKinney is an incredible guitar player. We were just at the house, jamming out ideas. Originally we had worked on this song idea and I had hired a choir to work on a bunch of ideas that I had for my album. I was like ‘I am using this, this s**t is fire.'”
But Kendrick had other ideas for the track. “I sent it to Kendrick, like, ‘What do you think?’ And he was like, ‘Yo, I love it.’ He was like, ‘This s**t is crazy,’ and he started writing to it, and he was like, ‘Yo, bro, I think I might need it. This is exactly what I need,'” Dahi recalled. “Just knowing him and his process, it’s like, all right, yeah. Maybe it’s a good thing or bad thing, but I don’t hold on to music. If I trust other artists or what they do creatively, I’ll let things go because it’s more about the messenger.”
The rest, as they say, is history. Let us know what you think of “Count Me Out” in the comments- should Dahi have held onto it?
[via]