David Peisner interviewed the biggest producer in rap right now for Billboard’s cover story this month. You can read the whole thing here, an excerpt is below.
Will’s first hit came in 2011, on Meek Mill’s high-energy “Tupac Back” (featuring Rick Ross), which reached No. 31 on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and No. 21 on the Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop airplay chart and has sold 176,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The more he worked, the more Will realized he wanted to be what he calls “a real producer,” not simply a guy hunched over his laptop making beats and then sending them out.
“I started bringing some weird, different beats, and rappers were just like, ‘What the hell is this? You got something else?'” he recalls. “I realized they can’t really rap on that because it’s not sounding like nobody else’s [material].” When he brought Future the beat for “Ain’t No Way Around It,” the rapper wasn’t interested. “I played him that beat 10 times. Every day I went into the studio like, ‘This beat is it!,’ and he was like, ‘Nah, I don’t like it.’ Finally, it was two in the morning and he was like, ‘Bro, you got some beats?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I got that same beat. I’m telling you, put some melody on it. It’s going to be crazy.'”
