Your friends at Vulture have decided to make it Todd Week over at the blogs, since his viral comments about the Rock Hall of Fame from yesterday just weren’t enough to satiate our Rundgren appetite. In further remarks given to Ultimate Classic Rock, the soon-to-be (and begrudged) Rock Hall inductee revealed that he extensively collaborated with Kanye West on his new album Donda, with the work amassing about “three albums’ worth of Kanye stems on my computer.†However, Rundgren believes that none of the work made the final cut, which he blames on West’s irrational creative process. “If I can contribute something, fine,†he said. “If I can’t, just let me know. There is a possibility that I’m actually in there somewhere. There’s so much junk in that record!â€
Rundgren says that he was introduced to West through a mutual peer in the music industry; despite not associating with gospel or “raw†music, he thought it could be a fun challenge to work with West on Donda. After several months of back-and-forth exchanges, though, Rundgren grew frustrated by what he believed was West’s desperation to quickly finish the album for feud clout. “He was too afraid that Drake would one-up him, so he hurried up and released the album the weekend before Drake could get his out,†Rundgren explained. “And in the end, Drake ate his lunch anyway.†As the final blow to the shins, Rundgren also described West as “a shoe designer … he’s just a dilettante at this point. Nobody would regularly make records like that unless they had stupid money to throw around. Nobody rents a stadium to make a record in. Nobody flies in the entire world of hip-hop just to croak one syllable, just so you can say that everybody was on it.â€
The aforementioned lunch, indeed, was devoured by Drake on a silver platter. The rapper significantly outsold West in the mid-September charts, with Certified Lover Boy topping Donda by hundreds of thousands of units on the Billboard 200. Should’ve let Rundgren bang on his drum, man.