Since Outkast released Idlewild in 2006, Andre 3000’s output has been noticeably rare, with only a few guest verses dropping here and there. Speaking with The FADER, Three Stacks explained what it takes for him to hop on a track with another artist and how it all comes down to the music when he’s deciding where to toss a 16.
“Most of the time it has to be the music. The music has to kinda move me in some kind of way. Sometimes it’s emotionally, sometimes it’s just being there supporting another person,” he explained. “Even the Chris Brown remix [for “Deuces”] — of course I love the beat, but at that time a lot of people were on Chris Brown as a human being. And I know he’d gone through his troubles or whatever and I just was like—I just wanted to stand by him and be like, Hey, you know, you can’t really charge a man forever and condemn a man forever. So it’s really just like a support thing. I thought it was a cool thing to do.”
Echoing earlier statements that he’s hoping to release his solo album in 2012, Andre emphasized how now is the time to get the wheels turning on the oft-delayed LP. The ATLien notes that he has to put out his ideas because if he doesn’t, then someone else will execute the same concepts.
“I’m actually putting myself on deadlines more than ever. I don’t have someone policing that. Even in Outkast there were no police. But now it’s just time. I’m at a place now where my deadline is my own self. I’m looking at it like, Okay, I don’t want to be like 40 years old and to haven’t done this album. And I don’t have a sense of time. When people say, Man, we haven’t heard from you in like five years, or seen you, to me, it feels like a year. I don’t have a good sense of time, but I do know I’m not a spring chicken anymore. I have to get my ideas out before I just let them go away. That’s how ideas work. All the songs are written, we all just get them as gifts. And if you don’t act upon your ideas they’ll go to somebody else. I’ve seen so many ideas that I just sat on that other people have done years later, and I’m like, Wow, I could have done that. I just didn’t do it.”
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Read the full interview at TheFADER.com.
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