On Thursday (Nov. 2), Lil Yachty and MitchGoneMad unveiled the latest episode of “A Safe Place Podcast,” which saw them in a deep conversation with J. Cole. In the two-hour clip, the topic of Kendrick Lamar came up, which led to an origin story from the Dreamville head honcho about how he connected with the TDE alum.
“In a nutshell, [Lamar] had pulled up on me at No I.D.’s spot. We was already building a relationship, and I had these beats at the time and I was playing them for him,” Cole explained while recalling their 2011 collaboration, “HiiiPoWeR.” “There’s a few beats, a gang of beats that I did, [that] I gave him. Some of them maybe had a hook on them, a verse — this, that, and the third. So he took them and, you know, in that moment, we talked about, ‘Yo, bro, we should do a project.’ At that time, he’s not on like that, but I’m f**kin’ with him.”
He continued, “I think, at that time, him being so excited, that’s a look for him at that point. So, I think he went to Twitter like, ‘Me and J. Cole got something crazy coming!’ And he put up a picture of us. And from that moment, the fan base he had at the time mixed with mine, [they responded], ‘So what you mean by that?’… I believe that’s how it happened.”
As far as whether or not they’ll finally release a project together, Cole made it clear that the odds are low at the present time. “At one point, it was a real thing. But bro, time and life, we ain’t ever got the chance to really go in and do it correctly ’cause that would take time. For us to do something that’s full of our potential, that meets our real potential, you’re gonna need time. Maybe years. At least a year. When you got two successful artists with lives and families, that’s hard to do.”