There have long been stories of bad blood between Jay-Z and producer superstar Timbaland, which spawned around the 2009 sessions for Jay-Z’s last album prior to this year’s Magna Carta Holy Grail, but Hova has finally dished the details on what it was that drove a wedge between the two men.
The duo reconciled in time for the knob ninja to produce the lion’s share of Jay-Z’s latest release, but as Jay explained to BBC Radio 1’s Zane Lowe on Monday, egos became too heavily inflated during the Blueprint 3 sessions, leading the two to go their separate ways for a few years.
Mr. Carter explained: “The fall-out happened at the end of that album… A couple of songs was getting leaked and they were his songs, and it just ruined the whole process… Kanye, who was executive producer of Blueprint 3 was like, lets get Tim, let’s bring Tim in, and we were all inviting of him and he just wasn’t accepting of the process. It seemed like it was more about him than the actual album. When you go and make an album, you have to put all ego aside… he wasn’t accepting of that thing and that was almost the last straw type of thing, and we just went our separate ways.”
Cooler heads prevailed over time, and when the two reconvened for the Magna Carta sessions, it was clear that the troubles of the past were firmly in the past.. “He came back, I’d seen a new Timbaland, he had this maturity and this growth and I was like, ‘oh, ok, this is gonna work out’,” Jay noted.
In addition to his work on Magna Carta Holy Grail, Timbaland also signed to Jay’s Roc Nation label earlier this year – but the duo’s collaborations go much farther back. Timabaland produced some of Jay’s most prominent and well-known hit songs, like “N***a what, N***a who,” “Big Pimpin,’’ “Hola Hovito,” “Dirt of Your Shoulder” and more.
