When Drake surprise-dropped three albums last week, his friend and frequent producer Gordo was as surprised as everyone else — even though he’d been working on the music for the last year and a half.
“I knew it was going to be two albums,” he tells Rolling Stone on a recent call. “I didn’t know it was going to be three.”
But Drake kept his entire rollout a secret, even from his closest collaborators. That meant that on May 15, when the album trilogy swept the internet, Gordo did what most fans did: He spent time listening through the three projects, which include the anticipated Iceman, the unexpected Habibti, and the left-of-center Maid of Honour, which is where most of Gordo’s songs ended up. The producer/DJ/artist, known for his earlier work on Drake’s Honestly, Nevermind, helped mastermind eight tracks on the LP, including “Hoe Phase,” “Road Trips,” “Outside Tweaking,” “Amazing Shape,” “BBW,” “New Bestie,” “True Bestie,” “Stuck,” and “Goose & the Juice.” (He was also behind “WNBA” on Habibti.)
A lot of the songs show another side of Drake, moving in more electronic and experimental directions that capture the unconventional, club-driven sounds Gordo has made his signature. “It’s super, super different and it’s been this thing where I’ve been the guy that he has done different stuff with,” Gordo says. “Obviously, I’ve heard the rap stuff but him doing all the crossover stuff with me, that’s just the coolest thing about it.” He describes Maid of Honour as “just different flows, different energies, different vibes,” noting that it sees Drake test new territory. “You don’t ever hear him getting on that type of stuff,” he explains.
Gordo describes the last year as a constant back and forth as he sent Drake beats to pick from. “I was just sending him stuff and then he would just hit me back with what he liked. Every couple of days, he would send stuff back,” he shares. In between adventures like going to Berghain with Drake, which he detailed to Rolling Stone last year, Gordo says he’d work with his team to churn out new material for the rapper — though he didn’t know where the music would end up. “I would get about 30, 40 beats and I would listen to them and I’d be like, ‘Okay, cool. These are the records that I know Drake would really gravitate towards.’ And 98 percent of the time, he would be like, ‘This is insane.’”
But one of the biggest surprises is that even though Gordo shaped up most of the beats with his team, he says Drake ended up going into the production himself and splicing together a lot of the tracks. “I’m not going to lie to you. As much we worked on them, a lot of these records were done by Drake,” he shares. “Hoe Phase,” for example, veers into new sonic terrain, morphing into almost an amapiano sound at one point. Gordo says all of that was new to him when he heard the final version. “We would give him these pieces and then like, the version that I heard on the album was a version I never heard before.” The same thing happened on “Nokia.” “That was a completely different song and then he pieced everything together and I was like, ‘How the fuck did you think of that?’ A lot of the album was like that actually. ‘New Bestie,’ wherever these switch ups are, it’s a lot of him doing these switch-ups. It’s actually pretty crazy,” Gordo says.
He also didn’t know what collaborations and features would end up on the final LP. It was a surprise to him when he heard Popcaan on “Amazing Shape” or Sexxy Red on “Cheetah Print.” He was especially into the latter song because of how it weaves in a sample of Peggy Gou’s house hit “(It Goes Like) Nanana.” “The Peggy Gou one is really cool because it’s different. Fuck, I mean a lot of the records did their thing,” Gordo says.
Now that his massive undertaking with Drake is finished, Gordo says he’s diving back into his own music, already working on a follow-up to his genre-smashing LP Diamante. “As an artist, I’m a bit of a chameleon, right? I kind of do it all, but I have a lot, I’m sitting on about 40 songs.”
Still, he sees being part of Drake’s latest sprawling chapter as an honor and feels especially proud that he got to work on the music. When asked what it’s like to see Drake share his thoughts with fans after a three-year album hiatus and a massive rap feud in between, Gordo immediately points to how well the records are being received: “It’s been more than positive, right? So that’s a win right there.” He adds, “That’s literally a win. I’m so, so proud of him. He worked so hard and I’m happy that I’m just a very, very small piece into his legacy.”