Only a few days away from the soundtrack release to his film “The Man With the Iron Fists,” RZA admits that — for the most part — he got what he wanted, even if the film itself took about seven years to come to fruition.
The tracklisting to “Iron Fists” includes contributions from Kanye West, the Black Keys and RZA”s original family, the Wu-Tang Clan with standouts from Ghostface Killah and Method Man. And like just like in his film, RZA”s all over it.
When it came to picking and choosing artists for the soundtrack, “I got who I wanted on there,” he told me in a recent interview. RZA said West made himself available early on, and he asked the Black Keys to conjure something they originally cooked up together during the making of collaborations experiment “Blakroc.” Corinne Bailey Rae is “one of my favorite singers and she got a chance to see [the film] at 70% done. She and her sister said they loved it as women, and when she let me know that women would love it as well, I thought ‘This is great.””
“Wiz Khalifa also came up with a few songs as well after coming and visiting the color correction room.”
RZA also did something he’d never done before, and roped in the Wu-Tang Clan to put together tunes for and inspired-by the film. “And I never have ’em on anything,” he said, referring to his music department work on films like “Kill Bill.”
This hopefully will not be the last time the Clan comes together, and there”s been some rumblings that the members would reunite for a 20th anniversary of their groundbreaking first album, 1993″s “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).”
“The Dream would be to have one more album, another album as a final hurrah, and one more tour. It”d be cool to put together a tour with some other cats with other albums that came out that year,” he said, dropping Snoop Dogg and A Tribe Called Quest”s names.
“But that”s gonna take a lot. It”ll happen if everybody is down, and if we do it right. We gotta do it for our own sake — One more complete tour without glitches, no mistakes, no no-shows. We started off that way.
“With Wu-Tang… there was a big moment. We was artists in that moment early on. We never did the arena thing, but we could play to 30,000 kids. Sure, we do Rock the Bells and played some great venues, great production value, put on a dope show.”
I asked RZA, if anybody, who from Wu-Tang was a surrogate brother on this film, if anybody from his crew helped to make the project possible.
“Sadly, I was not helped by Wu-Tang on this film, I was left out there by myself. This was a very lonely road I was on. I have my wife and my children, but it was mostly long and lonely.”
Check in next week for Part 2 of my interview with RZA, this time with his first-time director hat on. “The Man With the Iron Fists” is out on Nov. 2.