“There’s nothing really to tell about that record, to be honest. I didn’t have nothing to do with that record. That was the label’s record. That wasn’t like I knew the producer or knew the writer or anything like that. That was one of those records the record company gave me, [they even gave me] stuff they wanted me to rap about. It wasn’t like, ‘Hey I did this and I went to a mountain and found inspiration and it was this.’ [Last April] I was backstage at a show at the
House of Blues in L.A. and the president of [Atlantic Records] came to me and said, ‘Hey check this out, I got this song.’ He played ‘Show Goes On’ for me on the iPod. I was used to it because they presented me like ten other songs in the same fashion or via email. So for me, at that point, it was just another record like, ‘Is this a song you want me to do?’ There was nothing special about it for me at that point. It was like, ‘You know we still want off the label, right?’ That was the conversations we were having.
“I did the record maybe a couple weeks after I initially heard it. We were on tour and I didn’t have the schedule to go record it, so the first instance that I had to actually go do it, I went and knocked it out. I knocked out ‘Never Forget You’ that same day. Then we had ‘Show Goes On’ for two, three months completed in some fashion. It was never a record like, ‘Hey! Lupe is super excited about ‘Show Goes On.’’ At that point, I was just drained. I was like, ‘Whatever. Another song, another day, another dollar.’
I had to do ['The Show Goes On'] and it had to be the first single if the record was going to come out.
“I had to do ‘Show Goes On,’ that was like the big chip on the table. I had to do it and it had to be the first single if the record was going to come out. And then there’s ‘Never Forget You’ [featuring John Legend]—which is another record I had nothing to do with—which became another bargaining chip, like, ‘Yo, after ‘Show Goes On’ there’s going to be this other record that you had nothing to do with.’ And I know John Legend, he’s a cool dude. But it was just a record he had sitting around and Exec A or Exec B heard it, and they were like, ‘Oh yeah! We’re going to put this on Lupe.’ And it wasn’t like, ‘Hey Lupe, do you like this song?’ it was like, ‘You got to do this record.’ At that point, I had already done ten records [the same way]. It was like I’d fly out from whatever spot I’m vacationing in, cut these records, and fly back.
