Nine years ago, Louisville, Kentucky rapper-singer Bryson Tiller exploded into mainstream popularity thanks to his viral 2015 single “Don’t.” The first single from his debut studio album Trapsoul, “Don’t” — which interpolated Mariah Carey’s 2005 hit “Shake It Off” — peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Tiller’s first top-20 hit and making him an “overnight” star. The track earned Tiller comparisons to Drake, the biggest name in hip-hop at the time, and rumors swirled online for some time that the Toronto native and Tiller had a collaboration in the works — perhaps even a remix of “Don’t.”
However, such a remix never actually surfaced, and as Tiller prepares to rollout the release of his self-titled fourth studio album, he revealed why it didn’t happen to Complex‘s Jordan Rose.
“[Drake] wanted to remix it,” Tiller explained. “The guy who produced the song [Chicago producer Epikh Pro], he was selling beats on SoundClick. That was where I got the beat from. I got the beat from him, and he never wanted to get on the phone to talk to me, which was weird. The song had like 100,000 plays, and I was like, ‘Yo, let’s get on the phone. Let’s work on more music.’ And he was like, ‘Yo, somebody from Young Money’s camp reached out to me. They said they like the beat for ‘Don’t’ a lot. I was wondering if you could sell it back to me? Because this could be big for me, bro. What if somebody like Drake or somebody wanted to get on it?'”
“He didn’t even know that Drake was already on my line,” he continued. “So I was like, ‘Yo, bro just call me.’ And after I told him that, he just spazzed on me. He was like, ‘Nah, I ain’t doing this, man.’ He just blocked his own blessings. It’s crazy.”
The two rappers eventually did collaborate on “Outta Time” from Tiller’s third studio album, Anniversary, which culminated five years of effort to release a song together.
