If the vast array of reports and numerous social media sightings are to be believed, Kanye West is currently holed up on a mountain somewhere in rural Wyoming, hopefully hard at work on his next album. It’s quite impressive all the many different friends and collaborators that have joined Yeezy in the great wide open. The list, that we know of for now anyway, includes Nas, Travis Scott, Mike Dean, Kid Cudi, Jeff Bhasker, Tony Williams, The Dream, ASAP Bari, and King Louie. That being said, those who’ve followed Kanye’s creative process closely through the years know that this is how the guys likes to work. In fact, all the evidence adds up to a recording experience similar to the one that Yeezy manufactured while creating his expansive, all-star packed masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and, more recently, The Life Of Pablo.
As history has shown, Kanye is someone who likes to break out from home and hit new and different locales while writing and recording new music. He’s hardly the first artist to use this method — The Rolling Stones, for instance, decamped to the South of France to record their own totemic album Exile On Main Street in 1972 — but few other people seem to get as much from working in new places as Yeezy. It’s hard to identify how much the environment makes it into the sound of his records — you don’t really hear Hawaii in 808s & Heartbreak, that’s for sure — but the feeling of being in an unfamiliar environment, far from the daily grind seems to spark something in West and adds to his production by committee approach to music-making. Having assembled one of the most lauded catalogs in music history, you really can’t argue against his thinking.
Here then, is a geographical history of where Kanye West recorded each of his albums.
The College Dropout
Being that this was Kanye’s debut album, you’d think that most of it would’ve been assembled in one studio. This is not the case. Ye actually spent about four years working on the material that would ultimately end up on The College Dropout, and did so in a wide variety of locations. Many of the tracks like “Spaceship” and “All Falls Down” were cooked up in the producer’s two-bedroom apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey before being finished off in several professional studios around New York and Los Angeles. On the East Coast, Yeezy hit up Just Blaze’s Baseline Recording, Sony Music Studio, Quad Recordings, and Edie Road Recording Studio, while out in L.A. he spent a whole bunch of time hunkered down inside the Record Plant in Hollywood, along with The Enterprise in Burbank, Larabee Sound North, Full Time Dreamer Studios, with some sessions logged in at the W Hotel in the city as well. Journalist Touré profiled Kanye for Rolling Stone around the time he was making The College Dropout and described his Hoboken pad in impressive detail, noting it’s “spectacular view of the Hudson River and Manhattan,” while allowing that it’s “sparsely decorated because he’s been traveling a lot,” but still adorned with, “a buffalo-leather couch with kangaroo-fur pillows,” and “on the wall in the main living room, there’s a larger-than-life poster of himself.”
Late Registration
For Late Registration, Kanye returned to the familiar confines of The Record Plant in Hollywood. In fact, 12 of the 15 songs on the album were recorded by Anthony Kilhoffer in the famous studio. That’s not to say Kanye didn’t stretch his legs and explore other locations to create the material. For instance, the hit single “Gold Digger” was actually cooked up in Ludacris’s home in Atlanta months earlier for Shawnna’s debut album, Worth Tha Weight. When she ultimately passed on the track — there’s a whole lot of what-if scenarios that spring from that fateful decision — Kanye took it back, re-worked the lyrics, got Jamie Foxx for the hook, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Graduation
Graduation was another album mostly cooked up in the Record Plant, but with additional work taking place at the nearby Chalice Studios, as well as Chung King and Sony Music Studios out in New York. One of the centerpiece tracks on the record however, the song “Homecoming” came together in one of the most famous studios in the world, Abbey Road in London. West was at the studio on Valentine’s Day in 2006, while Coldplay was hard at work on a project of their own in another room. At one point, Chris Martin poked his head in and the two began messing around with a track Kanye had had in his pocket for a minute, a song titled “Home (Windy)” that appeared on his 2003 mixtape Get Well Soon. West liked what he heard, and ultimately the pair finished off the song together, with Martin singing parts originally laid down by John Legend. In an added bit of globe-trotting craftsmanship, some of the megaton single “Stronger” was hashed out in Ape Sounds in Tokyo.
808s & Heartbreak
808s & Heartbreak was the first album where Kanye really went off the grid. To say he was in a bad place at the time was a bit of an understatement. His mother, Donda, to whom he was extremely close, had died less than a year before, and he was still coming to grips with her absence. Most of the album was conceptualized and laid down in a three week period alongside his protege Kid Cudi and Mike Dean out at Avex Recording Studio in Honolulu, Hawaii, with additional production taking place at Glenwood Studios in Burbank, California. The recording block in Hawaii came on the heels of a set of sessions to work on Jay-Z’s album The Blueprint 3. When we did ‘Heartless,’ [Kanye] just stopped and said, ‘No,’” Cudi said on Pharell’s Apple show Othertone. “I was like, ‘No what?’ He was like, ‘No way. This is my record.’ I was like, ‘Come on man. Can we just finish the guy’s album man?’ He was like, ‘Nope. I’m doing an album.‘” In an unintended twist, though the album is named after the Roland 808 drum, the number also represents the area code for the entire state of Hawaii.
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Perhaps the most well-known instance of Kanye going into a far-flung lockdown while creating an album occurred during the recording of his monumental My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in early 2010. When I say West spared no expense to bring this record to life, I mean it. Yeezy spent a reported $3 million nailing the sound, booking recording time in numerous studios, while flying out superstar guests and up-and-comers alike to Hawaii to add their own flavor. “50k for a verse,” Nicki Minaj would roar on her career-making verse “Monster.”
In a celebrated profile of the process for Complex, Noah Callahan-Bever called the set-up “Rap Camp,” with figures like Cudi, Pusha T, RZA, Nicki, Justin Vernon, Raekwon, CyHi The Prince, and many, many more filtering in and out of the three different rooms at Avex Recording Studio. Morning would begin with a pickup basketball game, continue with breakfast, and then it was on to the studio. Yeezy himself didn’t sleep in continuous blocks, preferring to nod off as his collaborators continued working around him. He became something of a player-coach, pushing everyone to bring their A-game. “He’s telling me, ‘Yo, you need to be more douchebag,'” Pusha T remembers Kanye telling him about his efforts to add a verse to “Runaway.” “He’s f*cking beating me for fucking more…Finally, after a couple of days, I said, ‘I’m going to go upstairs and get in total solitude and just do what I need to do.’ And: ‘24/7/365, pussy stays on my mind.’ It starts from there.” Avex became a music-making factory the likes of which had hardly ever been seen before, and probably have yet to be duplicated since.
Watch The Throne
Watch The Throne, Kanye West’s opulent joint project with his “Big Brother” Jay-Z was recorded in several professional music studios around the world, including Avex in Hawaii, but also Electric Lady and MSR Studios in New York, Barford Estate in Sydney, Australia, and Real World Studios in Wiltshire, England. However, most of the nitty-gritty was done in a series of different hotel rooms, like the Le Meurice in Paris, France and most notably, the Mercer in NYC. Jay and Ye booked six different hotel rooms at the Mercer and began banging out track after track at a furious clip for a few months. “When I first walked in and saw the equipment around I remember thinking, ‘This is different,’” producer 88 Keys told Genius. “I thought cats were gonna lay ideas down here and eventually take it to a professional recording studio… but nah, that was it. What they recorded in that room was [the finished product].” While the methods might have seemed rudimentary, the end product was a swaggering, maximalist masterpiece fit for a pair of Kings.
Yeezus
In a callback to the process that birthed the creation of his first album The College Dropout, a lot of the material that ended up on Kanye West’s gritty, angst-riddled sixth album Yeezus was created at home. When you check the credits on the album, you’ll notice a locale called the “No Name Hotel.” That was actually Kanye’s personal loft at a Paris hotel that he was renting out. It’s easy to see why Kanye would gravitate to Paris, what with its reputation for high fashion, and haughty culture, but the appeal went deeper even than that.
“In Paris, you’re as far as possible from the land of pleasant smiles,” West told W Magazine. “You can just trip on inspiration. There are so many people here who dedicate their lives to excellence.” Though Yeezus would continue to get worked on in Studios de la Seine in Paris, Gee Jam Studios in Jamaica, and Germano Studios in New York, the album finally came together in Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La Studio in Malibu. West simply had too many ideas and need the infamous “reducer’s” help in stripping everything down. “We ended up working probably 15 days, 16 days, long hours, no days off, 15 hours a day,” Rubin told The Daily Beast. “We talked a lot about minimalism,” Rubin added. “My house is basically an empty white box. When he walked in, he was like, ‘My house is an empty white box, too!'”
The Life Of Pablo
The Life Of Pablo not only took three full years to complete — “No More Parties in LA” began all the way back in 2010 — but when you eliminate the all the skits from his first two albums, it comes with more tracks than any other release in his catalog. All that’s to say, this thing was a messy, sprawling achievement that was cooked up in numerous locations across the world. Yeezy traveled to the Isle of Wight in England, Florence, Italy, did some work at his office/studio in L.A., but also set up a Dark Fantasy-style summit in two separate blocks of time out at the Punta Mita Resort in Mexico. West went out there twice, bringing along a Wyoming-sized crew that included Ty Dolla $ign, Theophilus London, Charlie Wilson, Rhymefest, Plain Pat, Pusha T, Big Sean, CyHi the Prynce, and Mike Dean. In addition to professional studios like Noble Street in Toronto, Larabee Studios in Hollywood, and Windmark Studios in Santa Monica, West also somewhat infamously credited “Abel’s Crib” in the liner notes on the album, denoting The Weeknd’s apartment in Trump Tower.
