What Nobody Knows About Jay-Z

He Doesn’t Write Lyrics Down

PHARRELL on Jay-Z’s private creative process.

Jay’s writing-and-recording approach looks mysterious from the outside, but it’s actually incredibly disciplined.

When Jay is working, he’s often looking in a direction—sometimes down, sometimes forward, sometimes off to the side—almost like he’s trying to listen to what he’s thinking. There can be a lot going on in the room, but he’s not distracted. If anything, he’s completely in a zone. He’s in what you would call a flow state.

He’s doing two things at once. He’s thinking about what he wants to say, while also workshopping

how he says it and whether it feels right over the percussion.

You’ll hear him mumbling. That’s really a lyrical exercise. He’s familiarizing himself with the track so he can flow.

What people don’t realize is that by the time he walks into the booth, he’s already recorded the verse in his mind a hundred times.

He’ll say one line, at the same time he’s figuring out the second. Then he says one and two together while thinking about the third. Then it becomes one, two, three while he searches for four. He keeps stacking it like that—running the whole sequence every time.

Most people would need paper for that, just to organize that many ideas at once.

Jay doesn’t.

His computational skills are just different. That’s the only way I can describe it.

And then he goes into the studio, and he’s done it so many times that it allows him to be what we used to call “one-take Hov,” because he could literally walk in and do the whole thing in one take.

As simple as I just made it sound, give it a go.

That’s the magic of Jay-Z.

There’s a Ton of New Music. It Is Performed in One Place

Filmmaker and musician JEYMES SAMUEL on the treadmill sessions.

He wakes up really early—5 a.m. or 6 a.m.—and he’s working out and he gets all his stuff done. All the super-successful people I know wake up early-bird-catches-the-worm. He calls me first thing in the morning and he’s on the treadmill, he’s working out, and he says the four words: “Are you by yourself?” This is factual. And wherever I am—I could be in Notting Hill Carnival, I will find a room where I’m by myself. And Jay-Z will give me the rhymes of life. He will give me, literally, the illest bars you’ve heard. He’ll give you the verse of the year. He writes all the time. A lot of time when he’s working out, the rhymes is coming, and he will just give you the verse of life! I make him repeat them, repeat them, repeat them. So he’ll do it like four times for me. And then we speak about it.

Everyone knows Jay-Z doesn’t put pen to paper. Okay, but here’s what they don’t know: Jay-Z discards more legendary verses than people write for their entire discography. The crazy thing is when you’re in the studio with him, you see him just lay back listening to the speakers. Then he’ll go, “Okay, got it.” Then he’ll give you the best verse, arguably, you have ever heard. And then, while your jaw is a-gasp, he’ll say, “But it’s not right. Nah, I’ll do another one.” It’s almost like he’s sparring. And then he’ll come up with another one, when your brain is like, “But what just happened to that old one?” His mental just hits Erase. It’s never to be heard again! And all you wish is that you recorded the first one in secret. I’d be cast as the best rapper on planet Earth if I had literally a percentage of recordings of what Jay just discards. He does this all the time. Jay-Z writes all the time. Every single day, he is writing, writing, writing. He is literally one of the best wordsmiths that has ever lived. He writes every single day and is a better rapper now: the schemes, the simile, the cadence, everything.