You were with Interscope, but you’ve dealt with some label drama when they weren’t on the same page as you and Hustle Gang. How’s the new situation at Def Jam treating you?
I love them. I came to them with my album in a state of about 80 percent done. They loved it. They loved the direction. They respected T.I. being a part of it. I think they saw why T.I. was important. Not necessarily my creative, but our relationship and our business relationship and him supporting me. It was nice to have that for a change. To be friends with a lot of the guys up there—Pecas and people that work there too and have their own relationships. I think it just worked out. It was a good fit. I’m happy.
Of course, I still have my label struggles. There’s budgets or things that I am going to disagree with. For the most part, I think they are brilliant. I think they feel passionate about trying to do something new or trying to have a new story and they always say to me, ‘If we did this, then this could be the first time somebody from Australia has done something like this. And we want to be part of the story.’ We want to help build the story or part of the history. They love that.
If you can make history with anybody, then ****, it should be Def Jam, right? I think it’s perfect and I love that they love that. Other people that I experienced [was] kind of me meeting hostility. ‘Oh, it hasn’t been done, so we shouldn’t have given it a bigger budget because it’s a risk.’ I think with them they are almost the opposite. ‘No, we should because we haven’t done this before.’ If we are going to do it, we should do and put our all into it and see if we can take it all away. I love that about them.
You just dropped the tracklisting for your album and you were saying on Twitter that you wanted more songs on The New Classic. You got what you wanted.
Yeah, they listen to me. I guess they said they’ve done research and people only want to listen to an album for this amount of time, but if you want to have more, you can have more. I just felt like for me, I’ve been working on this album for so long. There are some songs that I just can’t let go or have an important message. I need this sound to create the balance I want to create. I just felt that I could not do it in 12 songs—I need 14 or 15. I need those extra songs to make the story, because otherwise someone might hear it or review it and say, ‘Well, it was good but it was missing this.’ And I actually have that. I don’t want it to be missing if I know I got that in my stash. I want to put it on there. If somebody skips through, one song isn’t for them, at least I know maybe this was the song was for you and it was on this. I think it’s important.
Are you going to rock this album solo without any features?
It’s pretty solo. I didn’t write any features or anything down on that list cause we don’t want to just give that away like that. The album will probably be 15 tracks, standard. I am only planning on having three features for the most part. One of which is T.I., and there’s two more that I’ll add on there. I did this all alone. I just feel like I don’t need to put people on to add to it in a way. For me, if I put somebody on some of the songs, then I have to take off one of my verses. I don’t want to really do that. I just decided to do three features and that’s enough for me.
I think there are always times when you can put features out as a single or other ****. I just want people to know that they know me. If I get 75 minutes, I’m going to take all of my 75 minutes to give my speech. I am not going to let guest speakers come up too much—you might not know who I am. My main criticism has always been, ‘She’s good, but she doesn’t rap about anything good. She’s good, but she just kind of talks trash. I don’t know who she is. What is she rapping about? It’s a gimmick.’ Maybe if you know more about me and I actually talk about it in song, maybe that can change. And I like it to change.
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