While the entire world continues listening to Drake‘s Scorpion album, helping him break every streaming record imaginable, more fun facts about the effort keep trickling out. DJ Premier recently spoke to The FADER about how his contribution on “Sandra’s Rose” actually came about.
According to the legendary producer, his manager pushed for him to be on the project during a tough time in his life (his father passed away), so he hit Noah “40” Shebib to see what he would say. OVO was with the idea and as Primo tells it, Drizzy sent it back less than a day after he originally sent the beat.
40 actually sent me two, one was called “Sail,” like a sailboat. I worked on that, and he said, “[Drake] wants you to do that Preem bounce. Do your drums, your bounce, your instrumentation, the way you do your beats.” I did it, I sent that one back, then I started working on “Sandra’s Rose.” I thought that was a tentative name of the sample, not the song title. Like I said, Maneesh creates his own sample sounds, kind of like the way AntMan Wonder gave us sounds to do the PRhyme album. We just picked the ones I thought I could flip into a Preem-style beat. It was the same sort of thing here.
Maneesh gave me the “Sandra’s Rose” sample and I sent it back at like four in the morning, the night I worked on it, maybe closer to five. I get up very early — I take my son to school — I wake up 6:30 or 7 in the morning. As soon as I woke up, the first thing I said when I opened my eyes was “thank you.” Soon as I said that, the phone did the iPhone alert, the doo-doo-doo. When I looked it was 40. I figured he was going to say, “I got the beat I heard it, Drake’s gonna listen to it.” It was a video with the vocals already laid. That was a short window from me sending it, going to sleep, and waking up and it’s already done. He ended up jumping on that before the “Sail” beat which he had already sent me. Rick Ross actually spit on that one and Drake never put his vocal on it to finish it.
The consensus is that “Sandra’s Rose” is one of the standouts on Scorpion, so folks will generally clamor for more work from these two, but it’s interesting to see that they already have an unreleased Rick Ross feature on deck.
Read the whole story over at The FADER.
OS REWIND: J. Cole – 1985 (DJ Premier Remix)
OS REWIND: Royce Da 5’9″ & DJ Premier – PRhyme 2 [Album Stream]