In honor of his new album Suite 420 which hit stores on Tuesday, Devin The Dude sat down with Complex Magazine to recall some long-ago tales of studio and cannabis sessions with fellow music collaborators including Dr. Dre, Nas, and Raphael Saadiq.
“One of the coolest experiences was when I was doing the[Dr. Dre 2001] album,” he told the magazine. “I went to the studio in California. Dre was there but Snoop [Dogg] hadn’t made it yet. I finished my verse before Snoop got there. When I finished, Dre gave me a whole ounce of some green. Some good green. It was Chronic. I was like, ‘Oh shit!’ So I took some and I made a blunt out of that and gave it back like, ‘Thanks.’ But then Dre was like, ‘Nah, keep it. It’s yours.'”
He also described one studio session with Raphael Saadiq that ended in an entirely scratched project. “[Raphael and I were] working on a song for the Baby Boy Soundtrack around 2000…So we smoked and we was feeling real good at the time. We came up with a hook. And we was like, ‘Okay, let’s start on the verses.’ But when I was on the verses we kinda looked at each other because we realized at the exactly same time that the chorus we just did had the exact melody of an R&B song that was popular at the time. I don’t remember what song it was but it was the exact same melody! Then we starched that like, ‘Man, let’s get something else.’ That’s why I stopped listening to the radio when I’m doing a project. That shit can rub off real quick. We was like, ‘Oh mannn! What are we doing!’ We scratched it and tried our best to forget that.
While some blazing sessions ended in scrapped projects, others resulted in philosophical contemplations about Hip Hop history, as Devin described occurred with him and Nas. “[Nas and I] was talking about how times changed and what we had to go through in Rap. I was telling him how I felt near and dear about the beef that went down when KRS [One] came at MC Shan. I was like, ‘The Bridge Is Over’ hurt our feelings… Nas’ perspective, being from Queens, was saying a lot of niggas was hurt. They was saying, ‘Man that’s fucked up.’ But they couldn’t help but to jam to ‘The Bridge Is Over’ even in Queens.”
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Devin The Dude’s sixth studio album Suite 420 is in stores now.
