The legendary songwriter, bassist and vocalist for The Beatles, Sir Paul McCartney in a radio interview with BBC’s Gary Barlow revealed some fascinating details about his time working with Kanye West.

Beginnings

The two worked together on the hit “FourFiveSeconds” back in 2015 along with Rihanna. Kanye and Paul did some secret sessions together and according to Paul, if the track didn’t work out, they agreed to keep the sessions a secret. But the track did work out having gotten nearly 600 million streams on Spotify.

When he heard the song, Paul was surprised to find out that Rihanna was on the project. She was not part of the secret meetings and up to that point Kanye never mentioned her.  McCartney shared, “Just a month or so later, he sent back this record and it was Rihanna singing and so I had to ring up and sort of say ‘Am I on this? Did I have anything to do with it?’ I couldn’t tell!”

“He (Kanye West) said, ‘Yeah, what it is, that’s you on guitar, so it’s all the chords and the musical idea’s yours, but we’ve sped it up to suit Rihanna’s key, musical key, so I did it in A so now it was up in D’. I said ‘Oh I’ve co-written this thing?’. He said ‘Yeah’”.

The Now

It might have been Kanye’s plan all along to keep Paul in the dark about Rihanna as the self-proclaimed genius often works in strange ways. Paul attested to the same when he talked about what it was like to work with West. “I worked with him and it was a very interesting way of working. It wasn’t two guitars like me and John used to be, this was more cerebral. It was just talking and thinking and me plonking away a little bit. And you record everything and he takes it away and kind of does stuff with it”.

Even the great Sir Paul McCartney was wowed by the musical talent of Kanye West! Just don’t tell Kanye, or he’ll likely want to become Sir Kanye West before 2020 rolls around.