Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar are music giants. And given their shared status, they both seem to recognize and respect each other’s talents. As a matter of fact, they admire each other’s music so much that the two collaborated on Swift’s song “Bad Blood”.
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Released in 2014, Lamar and Swift’s single peaked at no. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and on the Billboard Pop Songs Radio Airplay chart. This collaboration wouldn’t have come to fruition if it weren’t for some of Lamar’s earlier music.
While on the Howard Stern Show, Kendrick Lamar divulged the timeline and process of his and Swift’s collaboration on “Bad Blood”. The Lamar song that caught Swift’s attention was his 2012 single, “Backstreet Freestyle”. Thanks to that single, Taylor Swift was apparently dying to work with Lamar. And given that she’s Taylor Swift, she can make that kind of thing happen with the snap of her fingers.
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“We both was in LA so I came to her studio session,” Lamar told Stern. “She had the music up and I started writing and I hopped in the booth and we laid it down.”
Lamar didn’t clearly state how long the collaboration took per his comments, but he made it seem like it happened fairly quickly.
Regardless of time, Lamar openly divulged the casual seamlessness embedded in the project.
“With this particular record, it was me just vibing and catching her lyrics,” he continued. “I didn’t want to get into her head too crazy. I just wanted to have my own inspiration and see where it took it. […] Fortunately, the vibe was right, and it didn’t take too many takes and we was really locked in on chemistry and we really felt what was going on when I was in the booth.”
In the concluding parts of the segment, Lamar spoke about the surprising elements used in the song and how he was fearful about how it would cross into the hip-hop genre.
“They had these drums I’d never heard of in the hip-hop culture, so I knew it would cross worlds, but it didn’t do it the right way,” said Lamar.
Though Lamar liked the music too much to let it get in his way, he concluded his interview by saying that “it was all in the music first.”
“I liked the track and we rocked out,” said Lamar.
Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
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