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Bigger Than ‘Yeezus’: Kanye West Plots Collab With Paul McCartney, Rihanna, Ty Dolla Sign

Ty Dolla Sign Paul McCartney Kanye West Rihanna Collaboration Track Only One Interview

If you listen off in the background of “Only One,” Kanye West’s sentimental New Year’s Day collaboration with Paul McCartney, you’ll hear some autotuned crooning that belongs to a lesser known songwriting great, the R&B singer Ty Dolla $ign. In an excited interview on Friday with Billboard, the Beach House architect dealt on how he came to be involved with that collaboration, as well as dropping the tidbit that many more tracks with Kanye are coming—including one that features the ex-Beatle and Rihanna.

“One day my homie hit me up and was like, ‘Kanye wants you to come work with him in Mexico,’ so I came out there [and] we did like nine songs in one day,” he explains of his involvement in the project. “One of them happened to be ‘Only One.'”

He said that Ye was pretty “open to [his] input,” on the tracks, turning him loose with a microphone and telling him to “do whatever [he] wanted to do.” That resulted in seven to nine songs worth of material over the course of one day, which he says taught him to “take [his] time and really examine what’s dope and what’s not.” He doesn’t know yet which of the songs he recorded ended up making the final version of the follow-up to Yeezus, but he did say that a collaboration with Macca, Rihanna, and Kanye was “about to drop” and that a video had already been shot.

It was another Beatle who proclaimed that the famed quartet was “more popular than Jesus,” but a track with that many stars could manage to be more popular than Yeezus, if nothing else. For more on Ty Dolla $ign, read SPIN’s early 2014 profile on the singer.