Kanye West Scrapped His Entire ‘Ye’ Album Weeks Before Its Release
Grammy-winning rapper Kanye West has been known to be a perfectionist with his music, tweaking his releases after they’re out and often redoing albums throughout their recording process. His 2018 album Ye was no exception.
Kanye scrapped ‘Ye’ weeks before its release and started from scratch
Kanye’s longtime collaborator Mike Dean sat down with Nile Rodgers on his Deep Hidden Meaning show to discuss music and more. When discussing working with Kanye, Dean confirmed that his recording process is often all over the place.
“Till it’s over, anything can happen, especially Kanye,” he said.
He went on to describe recording the Ye album at Kanye’s compound in Wyoming. “In Wyoming, for the Ye album, we had 10 songs, I guess. And we were trying to do a seven-song album,” he explained. “I came in one day and he’d erased the whole board and said, ‘We’re starting over.’ That’s what happened. And we did it in like two weeks. We made seven songs and it came out pretty good.”
Dean isn’t the only one to testify to Kanye’s unique recording process. Longtime collaborator Rick Rubin revealed that Kanye recorded most of the vocals on his 2013 album Yeezus two days before its release, with half of the vocals coming together within two hours.
Kanye West recorded ‘Ye’ after an infamous TMZ appearance
In 2018, Kanye made headlines for his infamous comments likening slavery to a choice and his subsequent surprise appearance at the TMZ offices.
Kanye explained how those experiences shaped the final outcome of the album in an appearance on BigBoyTV ahead of the project’s release. “I just completely did a completely new album,” he said. “With what the universe was giving me, I wanted something that matched that energy.”
“I completely redid the album after TMZ,” he continued. “We just sat there and really honed in on the words.”
Kanye explained that the first version of the album was more political, but he realized that certain lyrics would just become headline fodder, given his praise of President Donald Trump in recent days. “We know now it’s all headlines and every bar can be used,” he said. “There were even bars that we had about that. I took them off the album. It was just too sensitive. It was about that topic. I was like, ‘Yo, I’m going to just chill right now.'”
He released the album with artwork that read “I hate being bi-polar; it’s awesome.”
He legally changed his name to ‘Ye’
Ye is more than just an album title or a nickname for Kanye. In 2021, he legally changed his name to simply Ye, dropping his birth name of Kanye Omari West entirely.
According to court documents obtained by Page Six, West changed his name for personal reasons. His name change was finalized in October 2021, and the “All of the Lights” rapper has gone by the Ye moniker since.
