From the outside, the final weeks of the creation of Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo appeared to be rushed (to say the least). Actually, a week after its initial release, we still don’t even know if it is finished. Shedding a little light on the confusing situation, Kanye’s longtime recording engineer says they worked 20 hour days to bring “a collection of ideas” to a finished product over the last five weeks of the recording process.
In an interview with Billboard, Dawson says he got a call from Kanye in early January to come help finish the album because Noah Goldstein (West’s lead engineer) “was just getting tired being up 24 hours a day.”
“I would usually show up to the studio around midnight and then leave around noon the next day,” Dawson says. “And there was definitely stuff still happening at six, seven, eight in the morning: writing, laying down verses, trying out beat ideas, that sort of stuff. So it was kind of a round-the-clock operation. Makes it pretty intense.”
He adds that many of the songs were still just loose ideas even as Kanye started taking photos of that infamous notebook and that they still weren’t finished when they played the album at Madison Square Garden.
