You’ve been a close collaborator of Kanye West and Scarface for much of their careers. Can you talk about how their 2002 collaboration, “Guess Who’s Back,” came together? Did you work on that record?

I wasn’t actually around when they were making the records. I was in Houston; they made that stuff in New York. Scarface brought them down for me to mix, so I mixed them at Rap A Lot studios in Houston. Mixed part of it in my house. I was just mixing stuff for Scarface. That’s the point when Kanye wanted to reach out to me—when the mix came out, and he heard it. I thought the track was crazy, groundbreaking stuff. I definitely made it knock really hard.

That was one of the first times when the East Coast and the South were crossing over like that. Kanye was bridging a lot of artists and sounds.

ADVERTISEMENT

Definitely. Nowadays, there isn't much definition to these tracks anymore; everything’s kind of blending together. [Houston] didn’t really care about New York, because we were selling records in our region. So we didn’t really care who liked us. Even if New York didn’t like our stuff, Chicago always loved it, and the Midwest and the West Coast.

Who did you want to sound like when you were first starting out? Who were you sampling?

The Rick Rubin stuff, Run DMC—all that stuff. But more influenced by other music too, like Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, rock music—stuff like that. I’m not a big sampler myself; that basically started [when I was] working with Kanye. It’s more him—he brings the samples in. I played in a lot of Blues bands [in Houston]. I used to play in biker bars, different places like that. A lot of trap music doesn’t have any samples at all; it’s all keyboard shit. There’s no samples in “3500.”

ADVERTISEMENT

You produced on Selena's earliest material, before she was recording in English. Dumb question: did you speak Spanish? How was it communicating with her family?

I don’t really like talking about that too much—about her dad and shit. I was trying to get them to record English stuff, in the beginning. They wanted to be traditional, you know. It was basically on some racist shit, really. I was white, and working in a Latin industry—there’s a balance. [Behind the scenes, there was] fighting, competition within the number-one band in the country. I was long gone before she started recording in English, but I talked to her occasionally—that’s what I had been trying to do the whole time I was there. ["Ya Se Va"]—that’s the first record I had on the radio and stuff. So I definitely learned a lot. I learned to get publishing on songs after that. It was just work-for-hire shit. Back then, you didn’t have the internet to learn to do this. You had to go to conventions and shit to meet people.