After dropping new videos for 4:44 tracks every week since the album came out back in June, JAY-Z brought things full circle today with the release of an hour-long interview about the project with the Rap Radar Podcast. During the conversation, the Brooklyn rapper revealed that he only started work on 4:44 at the beginning of this year. “January 3rd was the beginning of this album,” he said. “We made ‘Kill Jay Z’ and [‘The Story of OJ,’] the first two songs, and then I was like, ‘Okay I got the feel, I got the direction.’”

As Jay explained, No I.D. approached him with many of the initial ideas for the project. “No I.D. came to me with the technique,” Jay said. “He called me before he started this and was like ‘Man, I got your next Blueprint’… And he played me what he was working on and I was like ‘Oh that’s amazing… I was like, 'No no no I got where we can take this.’ I made him a playlist of all the things I wanted to address and talk about on these different songs and he chopped up the songs I sent him.” The Brooklyn rapper noted that No I.D. had already made the beats for “4:44,” “Kill Jay Z,” and “Family Feud,” but the rest of the songs they developed together.

“One of these houses that I had out here had mold in the wall and we didn’t know,” Jay said when discussing his vocals on the project. “So I go to New York and I’m like, ‘I been sick for two or three weeks…’ I had been recording [‘Moonlight,’] and if you listen to the vocals on ‘Smile’ as well. It gave it a vulnerability on it’s own… That’s why it’s not so polished.”

4:44 is just 10 songs (13 with the bonus tracks included), and Jay explained that they had to cut certain things to keep the project concise:

There’s a song called ‘Black Gold’ and ‘Part II’ of this other song, which was actually the response to ‘Kill Jay Z’ before ‘Bam’ came in that had this beautiful Al Green sample… Each subject is a four hour, five hour conversation… I didn’t want the album to get so long that we missed out on what’s important. That was really hard to edit and keep the focus where it was.

On “The Story of O.J.,” Jay raps:

You ever wonder why Jewish people own all the property in America?

This how they did it

These lines proved to be controversial, but Jay defended his use of exaggeration and claimed the context of the song absolves him:

It’s hard for me to take that serious because i’ve exaggerated every black image in the world. If you in the Jewish community don’t' have a problem with the guy eating watermelon… if you don’t have a problem with that and that’s the only line you pick out then you’re being a hypocrite and I can’t address that in a real way, I gotta leave that where it is because it was exaggeration. Of course I know that Jewish people don’t own all the property in America, but it was an exaggeration much like the racist cartoon… Context is everything and the context of this song outlines what I’m trying to say, and the point that I’m trying to make is actually, ‘You guys did it right.’

Before the end of the conversation, Jay addressed Kanye West’s infamous rant at his Saint Pablo tour stop in Sacramento, Calif. last year and his perceived diss at Kanye on “Kill Jay Z”:

It’s not even about Kanye. It really isn’t, it’s just his name is there because it’s just truthfully what happened. The whole point is you got hurt because this guy is talking about you on stage. What really hurt me is, you can’t bring my kids and my wife into it. Kanye is my little brother, he’s talked about me a hundred times, he made a song called “Big Brother.” We’ve gotten past bigger issues, but you brought my family into it, now it’s a problem with me. It’s a real real problem. And he knows it’s a problem because me and him would have been resolved our issues, but he knows that he crossed a line… I know he knows because we’ve never let this much space go between one of our disagreements, and we’ve had many… I was getting to a point where I said, ‘You got hurt by that? That’s nothing.’ You can’t diss somebody saying you got hurt, that’s the softest diss of all time.

Finally, he explained his intent behind the line “In the Future other niggas playing football with your son,” noting that there wasn’t any ill will. “It was a line to say, ‘That could happen to me in my future,’ and it just so happens that his name is Future… I don’t mean any malice, that was really my fear.”

Watch the full video above via TIDAL and read all the lyrics to JAY-Z’s 4:44 on Genius now.