“I was just asked to send some music [to Kanye], and I did,” Ghersi remembers. “I made sure to send maybe the strangest stuff I had, and it just so happened that Kanye was excited by that.” Although the adventure of working onYeezus is in some ways hard for Ghersi to generalize about—“There was really no constant other than the fact that at the end of the day, [all the music we made] went through him,” he says—flying between intercontinental recording sessions and working on a team that included dozens of others was certainly a far cry from making tracks at home. “It’s not something I ever planned or was ever trying to make happen, but it was just, like, a complete change in my life—putting myself in a high-pressured situation just to see what would happen,” he says. Looking back on the experience, Ghersi says it was Kanye’s authorial vision that sticks out to him the most. “It was a lot of coming up with design, like solving riddles,” he says. “If the song called for something aggressive, it was up to three or four people to design what in their head was the best solution for that aggression in that moment. Everyone would approach it in completely different ways, and ultimately, it would all be edited by Kanye himself. In a weird way, he kind of produced it. Not only did he select it, but he stylized it.”
?
