Paul McCartney recently did a Facebook Live chat on his page, hosted by Tim Minchin. During the live chat, McCartney was asked about his collaboration with Kanye West in 2015. The duo had worked together to produce three songs that would be released by West; “Only One”, “All Day”, and “FourFiveSeconds”, which also featured Rihanna.
“I got a phone call and my manager said, ‘Kanye West would like to work with you,’” McCartney told Minchin. “And I go, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it.’ I was a little bit nervous at first because I thought it could go horribly wrong. But I was intrigued to see what he was up to and how he did it.”
McCartney said “it was a very intriguing process. You basically don’t write songs. You basically just talk and noodle a bit and you record it all on your phone. And then he goes away. And that’s basically his record. But it was great doing it because I don’t work like that.”
McCartney compared the process of working with West to his time working with The Beatles on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
“So I was waiting three months after we’d finished [recording],” McCartney said. “I didn’t really hear anything but ‘Hey, bro, what’s going on?’ But I’m thinking, should I say, ‘Did we write a song? Will a record come out of this?’ Anyway, this arrives and it’s a Rihanna song. … I said, ‘This is great! I have to ring up and say, ‘Am I on this?’ And he goes, ‘Oh, yeah. You’re the guitar player.’ I go, ‘I don’t remember.’ And he said, ‘We sped it up.’ So they manipulated this, kind of – although, we’re talking about Sgt. Pepper, we loved manipulating. So I think we would have been into a lot of these tricks nowadays because we did speed things up a little bit.”