May 10, 2017 Pretty interesting read tbh. Sinjin Hawke co-produced Kanye West’s 2016 track “Wolves” alongside Cashmere Cat and Mike Dean, but the Canadian-American producer had a bigger hand in the creation of The Life of Pablo than the album credits let on. In a new interview with Fader, Hawke explained how he created hundreds of demos for the album, almost up to its release date: It was two or three weeks before the release [of TLOP]. I reached out to Virgil [Abloh], and asked him, ‘Do you need anything for ‘Wolves’? Because I have all the stems here.’ I knew they might be in the mixing stages. He wrote me back, ‘You know what, we actually need beats, because the album isn’t done yet.’ I had about 150 demos on my hard drive, so Zora and I got to finishing them. We worked day and night, sending about six batches of 20-30 songs at a time. At that point, it was about a week before the album was done. Kanye had announced the tracklist already. So I was like, ‘Okay Virgil, here’s the last batch, good luck with the record!’ And he was like, ‘We still need more beats!’ So I squeezed one last session out of myself. Kanye had announced that it was a gospel record, and I had a few experiments that I had been working on in the form of gospel, using key changes and claps. Kanye ended up flying him out to Los Angeles to work on the album right before it was supposed to drop: The day after, Virgil hit me up like, ‘Can you come down to L.A.?’ At that point, I was at the hair salon [in Toronto] getting my hair bleached. One of Kanye’s people said, ‘Here’s your plane ticket, you need to be at the airport in an hour.’ So I stopped the hairdresser mid-bleaching, rushed back to my house, grabbed my bags, and booked it to the airport. I barely made the flight. When I arrived in L.A., I had this crazy frizzy orange hair, and I had to go to the studio right away. I remember walking into the room, after two weeks of working day and night, looking like a disheveled studio rat with orange spiked hair. That was the first time I met Kanye. Hawke is only credited on “Wolves” and “Frank’s Track.” However, he managed to flip many of the demos he created for Kanye into his debut album, First Opus. “The process of preparing the demos for him crystallized the direction of my album." He also noted that he actually worked on “a lot of the songs for the album,” but couldn’t discuss it due to an NDA. Hawke’s album drops on May 10, and is set to include his recent single, “Onset.” https://genius.com/a/wolves-produce...sed-demos-for-kanye-west-into-his-debut-album
May 11, 2017 It's an amazing listen. On track 1 you can really hear the style of Wolves coming through as well.
