Paul McCartney Explains Why His Camp Thought Kanye West Collab “All Day” Was A Bad Idea

Carl Williott | May 24, 2016 10:11 am

Paul McCartney recently took part in an interview for BBC’s Mastertapes, and he discussed his still surprising Kanye West collaborations “All Day” and “FourFiveSeconds,” giving some interesting insight into their highly improvisational partnership. In fact, the former Beatle explains that their session was so casual he never thought anything would come of it.

“It was definitely different. Because we never appeared to write a song…A lot of what we did was just telling each other stories,”McCartney recalls. “After Christmas, I get this track back, and he’s taken my melody and he’s made it seriously urban. And that was a thing called ‘All Day.’ The lyrics are like, he uses the n-word a lot.”

On that point, when his people heard it, they thought it might be a bad idea for Sir Paul to be associated with the song. But he stuck to his gut. “People like Oprah, who are a little conservative about that stuff, she says, ‘You shouldn’t do it, even black people shouldn’t use that word.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but it’s Kanye!’ And he’s talking about an urban generation that uses that word in a completely different way. It’s the context. So I was actually pleased with it.”

McCartney also sheds light on “FourFiveSeconds,” revealing that he didn’t even recognize his own acoustic strumming because it was sped up for the final version (as was his voice for one bar).

All in all, it’s a very enlightening look at two legends’ collaborative process. Watch the whole clip below.