Warren G lent his production skills to 2Pac’s “Definition of a Thug Nigga” and “How Long Will They Mourn Me,” both recorded on the same night. Speaking with Hip-Hop Wired, the Regulator recalled being in the studio with Pac and how the collaborations came to be.
“I mean, he called me. I was at my sister’s house. I was broke, starving, didn’t have nothing. And he heard a record that I did on the Poetic Justice soundtrack called ‘Indo Smoke,’ so he found out that I did it so he gave me a call and was like, ‘Man, I’m in the studio, let’s work.’”
He remembers sitting with the fallen rapper and discussing the problems they were respectively facing in their lives. “I came in and we sat and we talked and I was telling him a lot of stuff I had been through and was going through with the industry and how fucked up I was and how sad I was, not being with the guys that I started with, which was Snoop and Dre, they was doing they thing and I just felt like I was left out. So he took what I was saying along with what he was going through and he put it into a song, and ‘Definition of a Thug Nigga’ came out.”
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On top of that, they also helmed “How Long Will They Mourn Me” while in the same studio session. “We also did ‘How Long Will They Mourn Me’ the same night. His boy Kato had died in Detroit, so he was like, Warren, you got something? Boom. Pulled up a track, called Nate Dogg like, ‘Nate, come up here and jump on this.’ Nate came up, rocked it, and then we had ‘How Long Will They Mourn Me.’”
