“I had to do ‘Show Goes On,’ that was like the big chip on the table. I had to do it and it had to be the first single if the record was going to come out. And then there’s ‘Never Forget You’ [featuring John Legend]—which is another record I had nothing to do with—which became another bargaining chip, like, ‘Yo, after ‘Show Goes On’ there’s going to be this other record that you had nothing to do with.’ And I know John Legend, he’s a cool dude. But it was just a record he had sitting around and Exec A or Exec B heard it, and they were like, ‘Oh yeah! We’re going to put this on Lupe.’ And it wasn’t like, ‘Hey Lupe, do you like this song?’ it was like, ‘You got to do this record.'”
“One thing I try to stress about this project is, I love and hate this album. I listen to it and I’ll like some of the songs. But when I think about what it took to actually get the record together and everything that I went through on this record—which is something I can’t separate—I hate this album.”
On the topic of the album’s multiple delays, Lupe said, “It’s like, ‘Another album out but the main root of the problem is still unsolved.’ And then there are records you literally had nothing to do with. That was a part of the compromise. Compromise doesn’t mean everybody is going to be happy, it’s just we’re going to do the best thing we can. The best thing for both parties is for this album to come out. Whether that means we’re homies or whether that means everything is cool now, that’s a different story.”
Read the full interview here and be sure to check out Lasers on March 8th.
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