James Blake has asked for his producer credit to be removed from Kanye West’s new album Bully.
The 37-year-old musician-turned-producer hit the studio with the controversial rapper to come up with songs for his latest release but he wants his name to be removed from the production credits because the finished version is “completely different” to what he worked on with West.
In a comment posted on the Vault platform, Blake explained: “The way I pitched his vocals and constructed the track from his freestyle is partially there, majorly peppered with other newervocal takes etc. but the spirit of my actual production is mostly absent other than that.
“My original version is a completely different production in spirit. Happy for the fans but I’ve asked to be taken off the producer credits for now as I don’t want to take credit for other people’s work and this version isn’t what I created with Ye.”
It comes after Blake revealed “95 per cent” of the work he does as a producer is “unpaid”.
He told Rolling Stone: “I’d say 99, not 99 … 95 per cent of the work I’ve done was unpaid.”
When the interviewer pressed him to explain to why he didn’t receive payment for his work, he said: “Well, because as a producer, you’re just throwing paint, you’re throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks.”
The singer-songwriter – who has worked on tracks for huge names, including Jay-Z, Frank Ocean, Beyonce, and Travis Scott – also shared that much of that unpaid work never gets released.
He continued: “I’d say the 10,000 hours that we talk about arriving at some kind of mastery of something, I probably spent that just doing things that never came out, which is nuts really.”
He insisted that it’s “just the way the industry is that producers don’t get paid by the hour. So you can spend a lot of hours on a piece of music, and then the direction of a record can change …
“And that can happen with me too. I can just wake up one day and just realize, ‘Oh s***, we’ve been going in the wrong direction.’ And then five to 10 songs just disappear.”
He added that it’s an “unusual industry for sure in terms of the way things are re-enumerated, the way time is rewarded. I think to come up against that kind of numbers game, I think you have to have a really true obsession with create, making music.”