Inside Lil Baby and Gunna’s Friendship and Collaboration Process
Rapper Gunna is fresh of the release of his latest album. His friend and fellow rapper, Lil Baby, is featured on one of the songs. In a recent interview, Gunna talked about their collaboration and their overall working relationship.
Lil Baby and Gunna are two of hip-hop’s biggest stars
Both Lil Baby and Gunna were two of the biggest up-and-coming artists in 2018 and 2019. The friendship and working relationship is heavily documented. They first got together after having a mutual friend who died.
In 2018, Lil Baby told Rolling Stone, “He [Gunna] gave me a lot of insights on how to rap when I first started. The basics, he helped me a whole lot,” Lil Baby continues. “When I say basics, I mean the real deal — how to record, you gotta go back and do your ad-libs. The simplest thing: how to save a song and send it to my phone.”
Lil Baby released hit singles such as “Yes Indeed” and “Woah.” Together with Gunna, they released the hit collaborative mixtape, Drip Harder, in 2018. The mixtape included the hit single, “Drip Too Hard.” It was one of the biggest songs of the year, reaching No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It also ended up at No. 26 on the year-end Hot 100 chart.
Outside of the songs on Drip Harder, they’ve also collaborate on songs like “Ready’ and 21 Savage’s “Can’t Leave Without It.” Lil Baby also appears on “Blindfold,” a track from his new studio album, Wunna, which was released on Friday.
Gunna and Lil Baby are also planning to collaborate on another mixtape, Super Slimey 2, with Young Thug and Future. It does not have a release date yet.
Here’s what Gunna says about working with Lil Baby
In an interview with Ebro Darden for Beats 1 Radio, Gunna talked about his collaboration process with Lil Baby.
He explained, “It ain’t forced. It’s like it’s easy now. It’s like we both developed and got ourselves together where we was doing this sh*t when we weren’t together, and now that we at a point where we stable and we controlling the market, it’s easier. You know what I’m saying? Especially when we do it together. Now it’s two minds, two great minds pulling together. So it’d be easier. A hundred percent, and he ain’t changed and I ain’t changed. Like he the same person, he just richer. I’m the same person, I’m just richer.”
This is just the latest in the storied relationship between the two Atlanta rappers. In July 2019, Lil Baby revealed that earlier in his career, he used to have Gunna write songs for him for $100. According to Lil Baby, he did this as a method of honing his own skills as a rapper.
He told 16Bars, “[Gunna] was already rapping so I kicked it with him and started f–king with him. Then I started rapping, and he actually started to helping me rap. I done paid Gunna to write my songs. I never put the songs out but like when I first started rapping I used to pay him like $100 like ‘I’ma give you a $100 write something for me so I can try to learn to go in and record it.’ I ain’t never recorded the songs and put them out but that’s how I used to practice and try to get it right because I just started rapping out of nowhere.”
