Feb 2, 2015 On "Only One" I was in St. Barths two days before the single came out. Kanye said, “I’m thinking about putting out ‘Only One’ tomorrow at midnight.” I said, “Should we mix it?” He was like, “It hasn’t really changed — it’s pretty much what it was.” I hadn’t heard it in almost two months, so I asked him to send it to me, and he did. And I said, “I think this can sound better than it does.” We never really finished it finished it. So we called all the engineers — and I’m trying to get all this to happen all remotely — and we got maybe three different engineers. This is the day before New Year’s Eve, and we’re all finding studio time, getting the files. Then they all start sending me mixes. I thought one was better than the others, and Kanye agreed. One guy mastered it, because it was due, and they turned it in. I had another guy master it, and it was better, but it was already too late. I think it switched the following morning. It was in real time! Like as soon as it was better, we had to switch it. That’s how it works in Kanye world. It used to really give me anxiety, but now I just know that’s what it is. That’s how he likes to work. On "On Sight" I don’t think this one changed at all, with the Daft Punk sample — or I should say track, the arpeggio coming out of their big modular synth. I think all we did was mix that. We hadn’t really heard anything like that in hip hop before. That may have been one of the inspirations for the minimal direction for the whole album. So we put it first, and it was really non-musical, super aggro, really noisy. I loved it, it made me crazy. A lot of people hate it — it divides people. On "Bound 2" “Bound 2” was a track that wasn’t initially a sample-based track. It was a band track with singing, no idea who. I got involved late in the game. He came in one day and said he got inspired driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, on the way to my studio. He thought it would be a good thing to try the sample he found, so we tried that and the whole song changed. The chorus was still the old way, where it was sort of a band version. I took everything out of that and reduced it to one sort of ugly sounding synth. I would say the old version was more like MOR, R&B. That’s just an example of one song on Yeezus that changed a lot. Some of them changed a little, some of them changed a lot. http://genius.com/RickRubin
Feb 3, 2015 (Just saw other thread. Delete pls) http://genius.com/RickRubin Rubin annotated this on Guilt Trip Kanye told me Yeezus was the first album where he was happy with the way it came out. Rubin annotated this on Blood on the Leaves I think he worked mostly out of an apartment in Paris, but I don’t really know the details, I never went there. I do know that it was a large space, because you could hear the reverb of the space in a lot of the tracks even when you didn’t want it. I think he liked the vibe there more than thinking it was a good place to make a good-sounding recording. Rubin annotated this on Bound 2 Something we talked about with Kanye was doing an alternate version of Yeezus, because there are so many versions of songs, great versions. There are versions just as good as what’s on the album, just different. I know as a fan of the album, I’d like to hear that. Maybe some day, whenever he wants. But it exists! That **** exists. Rubin Annotated this on Im In it I remember a few days after Yeezus came out, Kanye sent me a message, so excited, like, “I just realized there’s no snare drum on Yeezus until the sixth song! How cool is that?” Rubin annotated this on I Am A God When he played Yeezus for me, it was like, three hours of stuff. We just went through it and figured out what was essential and what wasn’t. It was like deciding a point of view, and it was really his decision to make it minimal. He kept saying it about tracks that he thought weren’t good enough and needed work. If he was going to leave me to work on stuff, he’d say, “Anything you can do to take stuff out instead of put stuff in, let’s do that.” Rubin annotated this on Black Skinhead Kanye played at some festival after the release of Yeezus, and his whole rant was something to the effect of “I turn on the radio and nothing speaks to me, and I don’t want to have anything to do with it, and I don’t want my music on the radio because I don’t like what the radio is.” So in that mindset, it makes sense that he makes a record that isn’t for that. It’s not about that. It’s so anti. It’s almost anti-hip-hop. It’s crazy.
