Conway The Machine had the opportunity of a lifetime when he and his Griselda brothers Westside Gunn and Benny The Butcher linked with Kanye West last year. Although Benny didn’t make the cut, Conway and Westside guested on the Donda track “Keep My Spirit Alive” alongside singer KayCyy.
With his own new album, God Don’t Make Mistakes, on the horizon, Conway shed light on how the feature came about during a recent interview with Complex.
According to the La Maquina rapper, they first met Kanye when Griselda performed a show in Los Angeles and Ye reached out to them to come to his Sunday Service concert series. The trio went and linked with Ye in the artist area, and things were moving as if they were always friends.
“Kanye, you know how he is,” Conway said. “He’s just kind of spur of the moment, and he just got a feeling like ‘Yo, man. We should just go right now to Cabo and just work on some music!’ Obviously, me and Benny, we have some stipulations that prevented us from leaving the country so freely, so we ended up going to the ranch in Wyoming.”
Kanye West is known for his infamous strict studio rules, and that was the case with Donda. Conway revealed he was taken aback at first by the no smoking, drinking or cell phone rules, but it wasn’t too much for him to not get comfortable and get his rhymes off.
“At first it was kind of different for me because I didn’t really grow up in the church world and I’m used to studio sessions where it’s the homies around,” he said. “It’s n-ggas smoking, it’s n-ggas drinking. You got ladies over here. You got n-ggas smoking over there, shooting dice.
“And this one — ain’t no smoking, no drinking, no nothing, you can’t even have your fucking cell phone in the muthafucker. It was kind of weird at first. Not weird, just different the first couple days. But, you know, it was nothing for me. At the end of the day, I was just happy and blessed to even be welcomed in that man’s atmosphere.”
Fivio Foreign shed more light on Kanye West’s strict studio rules inside the make-shift studio he built in Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. Fivio revealed during his interview with the L.A. Leakers in September the Chicago rap legend made everyone wear Donda merch and Adidas Yeezys.
“When we went to Ye’s shit he made us all wear like [Yeezy],” Fivio said. “We had the vest on, he made us all wear Donda merch. I thought we were on Donda timing, I guess to get us in [that mindset].”
Watch Conway The Machine’s full Complex interview below.
