We know Drake and Noah “40” Shebib are a match made in musical heaven, but the story behind their original meeting is usually attributed to the “Replacement Girl” shoot. A little known fact about the first time they met—that 40 once referenced back in 2011 in an interview with Complex—was brought up during their 66-minute-long interview with Nardwuar today. According to 40, the two first appeared together on the remix to Canadian R&B artist Divine Brown’s 2005 track “Twist My Hair.” Click here for the full lyrics to Drake’s verse on the 2006 “Twist My Hair (Remix)”—on which Drake says, “Cause I reside up north and ain’t forcin' a US flow / You heard?”



The meeting between Drake and 40 happened back around 2004 or 2005, depending on which interview you read, in Noel “Gadget” Campbell ’s studio. 40 was an engineering intern for the label Blacksmith , run by Gadget and Chris Smith, and working on Brown’s “Twist My Hair” when Canadian rapper Saukrates brought Drake through the studio. “Saukrates was producing all of the records on this album,” except for “Twist My Hair,” 40 says. “So he got Drake to come in to do a remix, Drake and Boi-1da came to the studio. And then Gadget yelled at me because I left his hard drives in the room.”

Boi1da remixed the 40-produced “Twist My Hair,” and Drake jumped on the remix. “I wouldn’t remember that verse if you paid me to recite it,” Drake says. Years later, Divine Brown contributed vocals to “Headlines” off of Take Care. “We also called in Divine Brown to add some vocals because there’s some male-female call-and-response in the song, so she could give the female perspective and add thickness to the chorus,” 40 said in a March 2012 interview with Sound On Sound. “This happened over three or four days of Drake and I working alone at my studio.”

As 40 mentioned in his 2011 interview with Complex, it wasn’t until the “Replacement Girl” shoot that he really sat down with Drake to play him music and talk about working together, but it was the “Twist My Hair (Remix)” that got 40 and Drake their first joint credits.