Rolling Stone recently caught up with Chance The Rapper and asked him about his appearance on Lil Wayne‘s latest mixtape, Dedication 5. Chance explains how Weezy F Baby hit him up asking for a song to be done in one day and how stressful it was for him.
“You Song,” one of the hottest cuts off Lil Wayne’s Dedication 5 mixtape, features one of your most killer verses. When did you find out that was going down?
We had just got back in Chicago the day before from Europe, and this was supposed to be our one day off between touring the States and coming back from Europe. That morning I woke up. The first thing I saw was a text from my manager Pat in the morning: “Wayne wants a song for Dedication 5. He needs it in two days.” You can imagine all the stress that I instantly felt on my head, to not only do a perfect song for Wayne, but to have it done that one day, ’cause we were leaving the next day.So how did you approach it?
I was a little bit scatterbrained. I was just stressed out, ’cause I was like, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m about do.” So I hit Pat back like, “What beat does he want?” And Pat’s like, “I’ll check for you right now.” He hits me right back: “He says it could be whatever beat you want.” That just made it so much more stressful. What beat do I pick for Lil Wayne’s Dedication 5 mixtape? I’m thinking instantly I gotta pick some Chicago street shit. I was gonna do, like, Z Money “Bitches Want My Money’ or a [Chief] Keef record, or just some Chicago shit. I figured it made sense. I wanted to rap about some Dedication 5-ass shit: what was going on, the shit that I recently got. Tell my story all over again.
Was “You Song” one of your favorite tracks off D5 ❓
