Just in case you weren’t aware, A-Trak was involved in the early part of Kanye West‘s career. He toured with Yeezy during his first major headlining tour and for a handful of them afterward. He was part of some of his biggest records, something that’s not so highly publicized.
Although we’ve never heard such first-person testimonial come out about Kanye’s work because he keeps things so secretive, this may be one of the only glimpses we hear for a long time about how some of those smash hits were crafted.
On “Stronger”
“I gave him that sample. I’m the culprit. And I didn’t want him to sample it, that’s what’s funny.
It sort of happened because Swizz Beats sampled “Technologic” for that Busta Rhymes record, “Touch It.” We were on tour in Europe in 2006, spending a lot of hours on the bus listening to the radio. Kanye heard “Touch It” and thought that beat was cool. I said, “He just swooped up Daft Punk.” And Ye said, “Who?” I just couldn’t believe that Kanye had never heard Daft Punk.
We kept touring, and months later he called me one day and said, “Are you by a computer? I’m going to send you something.” He sent me the instrumental for what became “Stronger.” I remember calling him back and being like, begrudgingly, “Alright, you flipped it, it’s dope.”
He made the beat and spent months writing and rewriting his verses. At the end, he decided he wanted me to scratch on it, sort of an “it’s only right” kind of thing. So I have a small four-bar scratch solo towards the end, which you can barely hear.
Scratching, and the choice of scratch samples, hadn’t adapted to the new sound of music yet. People still scratched the same scratch samples from the eighties and nineties that come from James Brown records and the like. Meanwhile, music was becoming synthetic. I felt like we, the scratch DJs, needed to create new scratch samples or adapt our choice of samples to a more electronic sound. I put a phaser on my scratch to make it wash with the synths a certain way. It barely sounds like a scratch, which was the intention.”
On “Gold Digger”
There was one period where we weren’t doing Kanye tours, I was doing my own shows, and he was in the studio with Jon Brion recording the bulk of Late Registration. I knew “Gold Digger,” the song, because even on the previous tour he had the instrumental and the idea. He used to rap it to us all the time in the tour bus — he just hadn’t recorded it.
We got back together to play the Sasquatch Festival, and were catching up in the trailer. He said, “Let me play you something. I put my vocals on all these songs.” For “Gold Digger,” he had this rough version, but it felt too pop to him. He wanted to give it some hip-hop cred. I had an idea for a scratch, for the part where he raps “Get down girl, go ‘head, get down.” I knew which sample to use. He said, “I think it could be cool. We’re going to LA this week to finish things up.” But he was over budget, Def Jam wouldn’t pay for any more flights for that album.
Next thing you know, it’s show time at Sasquatch. At the last minute, he gave me the track for “Gold Digger,” because he wanted to perform it. I ended up live-auditioning. I pulled up the sample for “get down” and I scratched during the choruses, and as soon as we got off stage he was like “Alright, you’re coming to LA, we gotta record this. I’ll pay for the flights, I don’t care.”
I went to L.A. and recorded the scratches, and the rest is history.
Read more of his stories on this and other tracks over at his GENIUS page.
OS REWIND: A-Trak – Push (feat. Andrew Wyatt) [Music Video]