Kanye West—who was, as you would expect, speaking on a panel at Art Basel—said last week, “I think my next album is going to be eight songs.”
Yeezus, which the famously minimal-minded Rick Rubin executive produced, included just 10 songs. This preoccupation with compression notwithstanding, Kanye did elaborate on his his goals at last Wednesday’s event, for*Surface Magazine’s Design Dialogues series:*”It’s just reducing down the amount of information that you need. People say a design is the point where you can’t take anything else away. [Yeezus] was very, very designed. I took a departure from radio and popular music in order to get this seat here. If I hadn’t made Yeezus, I wouldn’t be sitting here with this cool font at Basel right here.”
So far, so good. But eight songs does seem a bit scant. Does this mean that if he makes another Yeezus, he’ll need to cut the equivalent of “Guilt Trip” and “Send It Up”? Or even worse, “I’m In It” and “Hold My Liquor”? That would be sad indeed Sauce
8-10 songs is a good amount. I hate when artists will include 14-18 songs on an album and several of them are filler. I could definitely see the 8-10 song album trend taking off like it did in the 70s and 80s.
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