After releasing his fourth studio album – the first in four years – on Friday, Pusha T has been a busy man, chopping it up with interviewers all across the country as he explains how It’s Almost Dry came to be.
In case you missed it, on Friday night, the 44-year-old appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, performing “Dreamin Of The Past” for audiences while also breaking down the difference between the production styles of his good friends Pharrell Williams and Kanye West – the recently arrived record’s co-producers.
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“Ye is just a Pusha T rap fanatic. He just wants me to rap all day long, and then he just wants to take them from me and edit them and do what he wants to do with it, right?” the “Sociopath” artist explained, adding that Williams is “more of a composer,” who looks for “sticky moments” when putting a song together.
As Complex notes, along with the arrival of his new album comes It’s Almost Dry Radio – the rapper’s new live show on Amp. The debut episode was moderated by Idea Generation’s Noah Callahan-Bever, and saw Push connect with longtime manager Steven Victor to discuss his work.
“The project got started from me playing ‘Hear Me Clearly’ for Pharrell…And he told me that, it was okay,” the father of one recalled. “He shrugged….He said, ‘Man I just think that you need to be more of a character.’ I told myself, once it was etched in stone that [Pharrell and Kanye] would each produce half of the album, I was going to go through the process.”
“Whatever their process is, I’m going to go through it in full to make sure I have exhausted whatever they wanted to do. I wanted it to be produced because my biggest thing was making an album better than Daytona.”
In fact – the pressure he felt to top his 2018 release is the reason that Push opted not to work with Madlib, although he did receive some beats from the renowned producer. “I got some beats and they were actually chops from him. I just think he’s really dope at finding ill sounds and ill chops, and things of that nature.”
“But at the same time, it was feeling like a beat tape situation. I felt like to step it up I had to be produced – to step it up from Daytona. When you think about [my last album], it’s just beats and hard raps. I wasn’t produced. The structure of Kanye West you know, taking these things out or whatever the case may be. Honestly, it was just that. It’s Almost Dry is an exercise, definitely on the Pharrell side, in being produced.”
That’s not to say that Pusha T and Madlib won’t cook up some heat for us in the future, as they teased back in 2020 – read more about that here, and tap back in with HNHH later for more celebrity news updates.
[Via]