Kanye West Previews New Music He Made With James Blake
These days, Kanye West has mostly been in the news for reasons related to his severed relationship with the Gap and for the confusing statements that he’s made about it, but the man is apparently still making music, and he’s still doing it with prominent collaborators. Right now, Kanye is in London for Fashion Week. While over there, he jumped on the decks during a DJ set and played a previews of new songs that he recorded with James Blake.
James Blake has put in a ton of work with prominent rappers in recent years; he just produced Freddie Gibbs’ excellent new single “Dark Hearted.” And now Blake, it would seem, has made good on his longstanding ambition to work with Kanye West. A few years ago, Blake told Pitchfork that he “really wanted” Kanye to be on “Timeless,” a song from his 2016 album The Colour In Everything but that it didn’t work out:
Something was supposed to happen; I don’t really know how to describe how that didn’t work out. I wanted Kanye to be on the song “Timeless,” but the verse didn’t materialize. I think a huge swath of things happened in his life, and I just stayed out of it. Eventually, the mood of the album changed, and in the end I don’t think it would have fit. But I didn’t say I was working with Kanye just so people would get interested — I really wanted him to be on it.
One of those new tracks sounds like it samples “Always,” another Colour In Everything track. On Twitter, however, James Blake says that it’s not a sample and that the song is new. Blake also says that he produced this new Kanye track and two others, and he seems super-amped about it.
We don’t know when or even if the songs will come out, but James Blake finally got his Kanye collab.