Legendary Beatle Paul McCartney loves Kanye West, he says in a new interview with John Wilson for BBC Radio 4’s Mastertapes.
“People say he’s eccentric, which you’d have to agree with, but he’s a monster. He’s a crazy guy that comes up with great stuff. He inspires me,” McCartney told the interviewer in front of a small crowd.
The two have collaborated on music before, albeit with a process that seems to mystify the 73-year-old songwriter. “Definitely it was different because we never appeared to write a song,” he explained.
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Instead, a recorder captured the two swapping stories and McCartney experimenting with some two-chord guitar riffs he said were inspired by a Picasso painting. McCartney demonstrates the breezy guitar tune for the audience, whistling over it. Kanye took it, changed the tone, and turned it into “All Day,” a single released in 2015.
“He’s taken my melody and he’s made it seriously urban and that was a thing called ‘All Day,’” explained McCartney.
It was a track that some people advised McCartney to stay away from because of the language involved. Even Oprah thought it was a bad idea.
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“The lyrics [use] the n-word a lot,” McCartney said. “It’s a great record and the thing about that was when I got it and people heard it quite a few people said ‘You can’t be connected to this, there’s like 40 N-words’ … People like Oprah who are a little conservative about that stuff, she says ‘You shouldn’t do it. Even black people shouldn’t use that word.’ I said ‘Yeah but it’s Kanye’ and he’s talking about an urban generation that uses that word in a completely different way.”
Kanye also collaborated with McCartney on “Only One,” and again with him and Rihanna on “FourFiveSeconds.” McCartney said he was surprised to hear himself on the second record, and at first didn’t recognize his guitar because it had been sped up.
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“That’s the thing. You just work with him and then you leave it for a little while and let it marinate and just hope he gets back to you,” he said.
The three of them performed the song at the 2015 Grammys in Los Angeles, CA.
Watch the interview clip below.
