At eleven-thirty on a Saturday night, in a bland-looking office building on Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles, a security guard in the lobby directed me to a locked door. Hearing the magic words “Mike Will,” the man who opened the door smiled, introduced himself as the studio manager at Electric Feel, and pointed down the hall.
In the main room, the console sat in a kind of sunken cockpit where two producers could work side by side, surrounded by an open hangout space. A long hall led to an internal courtyard, where you were supposed to go if you wanted to smoke, a rule that no one was bothering to observe. There was also a glassed-in conference room, and that’s where I found Mike Will—Mike WiLL Made-It is his producer name; legally he’s Michael Len Williams II—in the midst of a business meeting.
Will is the twenty-seven-year-old founder and C.E.O. of Ear Drummer Records, a label and a production company. His credits include tracks by Kelly Rowland, Miley Cyrus, Jay Z, Kanye West, Rihanna, and Beyoncé—Will co-produced “Formation,” the song that Beyoncé performed at this year’s Super Bowl.
Will’s sessions tend to be loose, free-flowing affairs. At any given time, there are a dozen or more “creators” coming in and out—co-producers (Will has eight on his staff), artists, managers, and hangers-around—contributing to the vibe that is the essence of a Mike Will record: that moment, deep into the night, after hearing the song hundreds of times, when Will gets it and everything goes down.
“He understands the record, he understands the artist, and he understands the idea,” Jimmy Iovine, who was a producer before he became an Apple executive, told me. “Every artist and every song has an idea, and the producer’s job is to capture it.” At a time when a lot of music production is an assembly-line process, Will uses chance, spontaneity, and group dynamics. In his sessions, jamming and messing around—ear drumming, you could call it—lead to happenstance and creativity. He seems a bit like a control freak who understands that control has no useful part to play in the process.
A couple of young white guys in hoodies from 300 Entertainment, Lyor Cohen’s music and management company, were discussing putting together a record deal with Joseph Antney, a Queens-based musician who was signed to Ear Drummer Records as Yung Joey. Antney was there, but he didn’t say much. He kept one palm hovering a half inch over his bare, well-inked abs, occasionally allowing himself to touch skin before pulling his hand back again.
Will sat at a laptop and played a number of Antney’s songs that were in various states of completion. Some tracks included drums and other instrumentation; others were made up of loops with Antney’s raunchy raps on top. Tall and broad-shouldered, Will has a domed forehead, hooded eyes that often wear a deceptively sleepy expression, a closely cropped beard, and a tendency to mumble when he talks. He was in his customary attire: white T-shirt, track pants, New Balance kicks, a gold chain, a jewelled watch, and diamond studs in both ears.
“I feel like he’s a mix of Nelly, LL Cool J, and Fiddy,” Will said, mentioning two artists who are considered not just rappers but entertainers, and the artist and entrepreneur known as 50 Cent. “He’s got that melodic shit, but he’s gonna come out as a rhythmic artist.”
Will talked about the need for an artist like Antney to achieve “separation,” by which he meant the ability to distinguish himself from other performers. “I want an artist to come like Superman”—that is, out of the clear blue sky—“big-ass looks, good-ass music.” He wasn’t impressed by an artist’s twenty million Twitter followers, because “that’s twenty million people who knew you before you were this you.” (In fact, Will is in the process of rebranding the artist formerly known as Yung Joey as X.A.N.—“Xpensive Ass Nigga.”)
Antney grunted in agreement. He looked ready to fly.
“I’m just trying to take the next step with him,” Will went on. “So what’s the next step?”
“Well, I think we really want to get a single together,” one of the hoodies said. “Tonight, if possible.”
That night, Antney was supposed to catch a flight back East, which might be expensive to rebook. Will glanced at the hoodies.
“Let’s do it,” one of them said.
“O.K., so I’m gonna go knock the drums out, that’s first and foremost,” Will said, getting up and heading down the hall to the main room with Antney following.
A hip-hop producer’s personality often shows through most clearly on drums. Mike Will’s drums have a swampy sound that derives from his years of apprenticeship in the basement of his family’s home in Marietta, a suburb of Atlanta. As the artist Big Sean, who has collaborated with Will on several records, put it, “I think his drums are different. They’re muddy, but they hit hard. It’s rare. You can tell from the textures somebody took the time to make sure that the sonics are right, and you got to appreciate that.” In the Big Sean song “Paradise,” which is on Will’s 2014 mixtape “Ransom,” the rapper’s light, skipping flow over Will’s heavy dun-dun-DAH-dun-DAH beat is like the frosting on a molten-chocolate cake.
Drums on hip-hop songs are almost always created electronically, on computers. On a Mike WiLL Made-It track, different drum sounds are combined with other percussion effects, making a dense sonic impasto that stutters and shimmies through the song, until all the elements coalesce for the climax. His beats—the rhythmic and instrumental tracks that form the base for most hip-hop songs—also incorporate melodic elements derived from synthetic keyboards and woodwinds, to give a sense of spaciousness.
Beats are how many hip-hop songs begin; rappers write their rhymes to them. And beatmaking is the way a lot of hip-hop icons begin—Dr. Dre and Kanye West started out as beatmakers. But lots of people can make beats; only a few beatmakers become super-producers.
Will’s productions aren’t instantly recognizable in the way that, for example, Timbaland’s are. Miley Cyrus, who worked with Will on her 2013 album, “Bangerz,” told me, “Mike could lock you in a studio for five days and not play the same beat twice. He has such a library of what he has created.”
In the main room, two producers, Louis Bell and Roofeeo (né Jahphet Landis, the drummer for TV on the Radio), who had come in for the session, were sitting at the console. Will stood next to them, supervising the process of putting drums on Antney’s song.
They began with a snare and a kick drum. The producers would play drum samples from different software files, each barely distinguishable from the next, at least to my ear, but Will knew immediately when he heard the right drum. (“He never ever second-guesses his ear,” Miley Cyrus said.) Within half an hour or so, they had the basic drum sound down and began to work on the instrumentation.
“I want this shit to go rhythmic,” Will said. “Rhythmic and pop. It could be like—what’s that song?” He hummed a little bit of a tune and then, in a falsetto voice, sang, “Oh, baby . . .”
“Exactly,” Bell said, recognizing the late-eighties song “Just a Friend.” “That Biz Markie vibe.”
Roofeeo noodled around on a keyboard, playing airy, wheedling little melodies. These spooky-sounding keys, such as one might hear on the soundtrack of a psychological thriller, are another Mike WiLL Made-It trademark.
“That sounds dope,” Will said. “Keep rocking that.”
“I might have to write another verse,” Antney said, and got busy with a pad and a pencil.
“This your record?” Roofeeo asked.
“Yeah.” Antney looked intense, in a kind of trance as he listened to the beat.
“This shit hard, bro.”
Meanwhile, back in the conference room, a young Ear Drummer co-producer named Shod had come up with a new beat on his laptop—shup-chuga-chuga-shup. Shod, nineteen, is one of the many cousins of Will who are scattered around the country; he lives in Inglewood. When Will heard that Shod was getting into trouble, he got him into beatmaking instead.
Will summoned Antney into the conference room, and both of them started scat-singing into their phones, using an app called VoiceNote to record themselves. They kept at it for ten minutes or so, until they had a couple of different melodic ideas, which they texted to Shod to work on. Will was elated with the results.
“Damn, Shod!” Will exclaimed, grabbing the teen-ager by the shoulders and shaking him affectionately. Shod didn’t smile, but you could see that he was proud. Then he got back to work.
Mike Will was born in Atlanta in 1989, the same year that Antonio (L.A.) Reid and Kenneth (Babyface) Edmonds founded LaFace Records, the label that signified the birth of Atlanta as a music town, spawning the careers of such first-generation Atlanta stars as TLC, Toni Braxton, OutKast, Usher, and Goodie Mob. Young Mike and the musical milieu around him grew up together. “The A,” as locals refer to Atlanta, offers significant advantages to a precocious talent like Will—a wide range of homegrown talent to work with, plenty of recording studios, and established producers to act as mentors. Atlanta also, crucially, can provide a protective environment that shelters developing musicians from the pressures of New York and Los Angeles.
The twin poles of hip-hop history are New York and L.A., but Atlanta has its own style, one that has evolved over the years from Southern rap to crunk. In recent years, “trap” has become a catchall term for the Atlanta sound, heard on records by artists as varied as Gucci Mane, Young Jeezy, Waka Flocka Flame, 2 Chainz, T.I., and Future. The sound—grimy, ominous beats with psychedelic instrumentation on top, made with layered synthesizers—draws from an earlier style developed by the rap group Three 6 Mafia and the producer Lil Jimmy, as well as from the ongoing work of influential Southern producers such as Lex Luger and Shawty Redd. The imagery and the rappers’ personas mostly come from the drug trade. Trap houses—so called because there is only one way in and one way out—are where crack and purple drank (a codeine-based concoction also known as lean and sizzurp) are prepared, bought, and sometimes consumed. The vocals feature the A’s “leaned-out” style of rapping—a hoarse urgency that commands attention, punctuated by mumbled soliloquies—pioneered by Gucci Mane and currently embodied by artists who aren’t even from the A, such as Fetty Wap (Paterson, New Jersey) and Desiigner (Brooklyn). It is the music of rebellion, as rock and roll once was—hard beats and raps calculated to drive any parent crazy.
Will’s parents, Mike L and Shirley, started their married life in Cleveland. Mike L—Michael L. Williams I—one of fifteen siblings, bettered his lot by learning about computer networks during a stint in the Marines, in the seventies. That led to a job servicing I.B.M. products—“everything from mainframes to typewriters”—and, eventually, to a position as a project manager on a contract to computerize all the check-ins, worldwide, for Holiday Inn and Hilton. Because of his work with I.B.M., he relocated to Atlanta in 1985.
At first, Mike L was shocked to see how black people would hang their heads when they were around white people and not look them in the eye. In Cleveland, where he had been a d.j. in R. & B. clubs, he hadn’t experienced that. He asked himself, “What can I do to make my kids compete on the same level with white people—with people in general?” In 1986, Williams moved the family—his wife and two daughters, at that point—to a development called Highland Trace, in the suburb of Marietta. Michael, born four years later, grew up in a split-level house, with a driveway and a yard, in a district where he and his sisters could attend an integrated school. Mike L and Shirley separated when Michael was in elementary school, but Mike L stayed nearby and remained a major part of his son’s life. Mike L was strict about Michael’s sticking with sports—baseball, football, and basketball, which had been his own passion, before he suffered a torn meniscus.
Michael was the only male in the house. Shirley was a mortgage-loan processor, who sang backup for the gospel singer Dottie Peoples on the weekends. The girls, Chonté and Monique, were eleven and six years older than Michael.* (Their parents had spaced the children so that they wouldn’t be paying two college tuitions at the same time.) Chonté, now a corporate manager, liked to listen to N.W.A. and Tupac; Monique, a bank branch manager, preferred Whitney Houston and Toni Braxton. Will’s music is a synthesis of his sisters’ tastes.
Michael would fool around on Monique’s Casio MT-520 keyboard, which she had inherited from Chonté. Several keys didn’t work, and the battery cover was missing, but “it was just the only thing that could make sound in the crib,” Will told me. “I used to listen to songs on the radio and play that junk back on that little keyboard.” He called this “ear drumming.”
In 2003, when he was fourteen, Will went into the Atlanta branch of Mars Music, the now defunct chain. “I go, ‘How do you use a beat machine?’ And the sales guy goes, ‘I’ll show you.’ ” An hour later, the salesman asked, “Man, that’s your first beat? For real? Damn, you should make beats, brother!”
Will said, “So I went to my dad, and I was like, ‘Hey, I’m going to make beats.’ And he said, ‘What are beats?’ ”
“When we were coming up, you had musicians,” Mike L said. “They played drums. So when you’re talking about making beats—what the hell is that?”
Will assured him that there was money in it and persuaded his dad to buy him a Korg Electribe EM-1 music-production station for Christmas; then he taught himself music programming. The station came with a software module that sounded like the Roland TR-808 drum machine—the sound at the core of Southern rap. At Kroger, where he bagged groceries after school, Will sold his beats for a hundred dollars each to some would-be rappers who worked with him, and used the money to buy more equipment. “I just wanted to get better. I was working with anybody and everybody. I’m like, ‘Hold up, I’ll make three beats for you for five hundred dollars and I’ll record you.’ ” He’d come home from his job and spend most of the night working in the basement.
“He doesn’t like earphones,” his mother told me, when I met her at Negril Village, a Jamaican restaurant in downtown Atlanta. “Mike would play music so loud that it was rocking the floor! I would say, ‘Could you turn it down just a little bit?’ I wanted to see him succeed. But it was really loud.”
Mike L insisted that his son sign contracts with the rappers who bought his beats. “I’m from the corporate world, so I said, ‘You need a contract.’ But Michael would say, ‘It doesn’t work that way, Dad.’ And I would say, ‘Well, shit!’ ”
Will also made beats for his group, FAY—three rappers plus young Michael, the producer. In 2004, they began to have success in the clubs. (FAY stood for Fuck All Y’All, but the group changed it to For All Y’All after they attracted fans.) But the other guys in FAY ended up getting “caught up in some bullshit,” as Will says, and the four went their separate ways.
Will was seriously tempted by the streets only “for a moment,” he told me. “At the end of the day, I was listening to the big homies and they were saying, ‘Yo, man, you got talent, man, stay off the streets.’ ” One of those older mentors was his uncle Roger, his father’s youngest brother, who was later shot and killed. “That brought it home for him,” Mike L said. “You hear about people getting killed all the time, but it’s different when it’s someone close to you.”
In 2006, Will met Gucci Mane (whose real name is Radric Davis) at Patchwerk, an Atlanta studio founded by Bob Whitfield, who had played with the Falcons. One night, Will recalled, Gucci was in the building, and Will passed him a CD with some of his beats on it. Not long afterward, Gucci summoned Will.
“Yo, the homeboy with the beats! I got a thousand dollars for you!” Gucci said. Will, all of seventeen at the time, replied, “I get my people to holla at your people, bro.” Gucci was amused. In the course of three days in 2007, they made twenty songs together. After one especially inspired bout on the mike, Gucci Mane bestowed on Will his producer name: “Mike Will made it, Gucci Mane slayed it!” he cried.
When Will first met him, Gucci had recently served a six-month sentence for aggravated assault after being convicted of attacking a night-club promoter. In a separate case, he was charged with the May, 2005, murder of a rapper. He acknowledged that a shooting had taken place after he was attacked, but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. (Subsequent stints of incarceration followed, beginning in 2008. This May, he was released after serving nearly three years in a federal penitentiary for illegal possession of a firearm; he is now back at home in Atlanta, and he and Will are working together.) Did Mike L worry about his son and Gucci spending so much time together? “Constantly!” he said. “Michael would say, ‘No, he’s cool.’ I said, ‘He has gone to prison—he can’t be so cool.’ Michael just said, ‘He got caught up in something.’ ‘Well, O.K., you just be careful out there.’ ”
Will’s work with Gucci, in particular, gave him credibility. Soon, he was working with practically every important hip-hop artist in Atlanta, including Future. His father insisted that he continue his studies, and his son did spend a couple of years in college, until, Will said, “I told my dad, ‘Man, Future and 2 Chainz are about to be the hottest in the game! I’m gonna drop out of school.’ ”
“You’re tripping,” his dad replied.
Within six months, in April, 2011, he had his first radio hit, with Meek Mill and Rick Ross’s “Tupac Back,” which had hard raps from Mill and Ross over Will’s haunted-sounding beat. Shirley told me, “I said, ‘Son, you’ll really know if you made it if Ludacris calls.’ ” Ludacris is an Atlanta rapper who started out as a d.j. on Hot 97.5, a local station. “And then Ludacris called! I even got to crying after that.”
I first heard the name Mike WiLL Made-It in the “drop” at the start of Miley Cyrus’s 2013 hit “We Can’t Stop.” A drop is a producer’s or a d.j.’s sonic tagline, which is introduced seamlessly into the mix. They were a feature of early hip-hop records; they went out of style for a while, but many top young producers are using them again. D.J. Mustard’s is “Mustard on the beat, hoe” and Metro Boomin’s is “Metro Boomin’ want some more, nigga.”
On “We Can’t Stop,” there are actually two drops: first, “Ear Drummers,” in a man’s distorted-sounding voice, and then “Mike WiLL Made-It,” in a synthetic female voice with an echo effect. Behind the drop, barroom piano chords play, and the leaned-out refrain—“It’s our party we can do what we want”—begins the song.
Before “We Can’t Stop,” Miley Cyrus was an ex-Disney kid who was trying to establish an identity as an adult artist. Her 2009 song “Party in the U.S.A.,” which was co-written and produced by the hitmaker Dr. Luke, had partly accomplished that transformation, although vestiges of Cyrus’s Hannah Montana persona remained. She had recently signed with RCA Records, and was beginning to work on her first album for the label.
Ryan Press, of Warner/Chappell, Will’s music publisher, arranged for Will to meet Peter Edge, who runs RCA with Tom Corson, in New York.** Will brought along his laptop and played tracks for Edge, one of which was a sketch for “We Can’t Stop.” It consisted of a chorus and verse that had been written by Rock City, a songwriting team of two brothers, Theron and Timothy Thomas; Will had worked on the drums and the general production. Edge loved the sound. “I played it for Miley and she loved it,” he said. “And once she and Mike were in the studio they clicked and became besties.”
There’s a looseness in Will’s working methods that gives some artists a sense of greater autonomy. “I had been working with Pharrell a lot, and this was a very different style,” Cyrus said, describing her collaboration with Will. She went on, “I felt like in 2013 hip-hop was the new kind of punk rock, and that’s where I was in my life. I was eighteen, and my mom was not loving it that I was going out and shaking my ass at Juicy J shows.” Will gave her space. “At that point, I was into recording at my house, and I like to be alone when I write, and he was just so chill about that. I needed that freedom.”
With “Bangerz,” her RCA album, which Will executive-produced, Cyrus used elements of trap culture to further distance herself from her Disney past. When she went further still and twerked to “We Can’t Stop” at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, she was heavily criticized for appropriating black identity. But, if the goal was to put a stake through Hannah Montana’s heart, Cyrus and Will succeeded. And, remarkably, working with a white pop star didn’t ruin Will’s street cred. Jon Platt says that was because “Mike Will didn’t cross over to Miley Cyrus. Miley Cyrus crossed over to Mike Will.” Not long after “We Can’t Stop” came out, Will joined Jimmy Iovine at Interscope Records. (A year later, Iovine departed for Apple.) “When I met Mike, I gave him a label on the spot,” Iovine said. “As soon as I heard his first song, I just knew.”
The day after my visit to Electric Feel, I arranged to meet Will in Santa Monica. In recent years, he has shuttled between L.A. and Atlanta, spending more time on the West Coast as his career advances. “In L.A., I’m a C.E.O.,” he says. Aubrey Potter and Brian Wright, Will’s two main Ear Drummer associates, often travel with him.
Among the artists on his label, in addition to Joseph Antney, are Eearz and Jace, both solo acts, and Rae Sremmurd, a rap duo made up of two brothers from Tupelo, Mississippi, who are his most successful artists so far. (The group’s unpronounceable name is Ear Drummers backward.) Their first album, “SremmLife,” was recently certified platinum. Will also oversees their feel-good videos and helps design the typefaces and the graphics that contribute to the group’s strong visual character.
“If you’re a super-producer, you can produce whatever you want to produce,” Will said, leaning against a railing on the Santa Monica Promenade. “That’s where I’m at.” To that end, Will had recently purchased a Red camera, to make music videos. “A Red camera is the best,” he declared. “When I started shooting videos, I had to pay ten thousand dollars just to rent one. I was like, ‘I do all these music videos, and I still don’t own a Red camera?’ So I spent about a hundred thousand dollars to buy one. My own bread. Boom! We can go shoot a movie right now. Why not? We’re just using the utensils at hand.”
We walked up Wilshire Boulevard to the Fairmont Hotel, where Will had been staying. Two tow-headed children, waiting by the reception desk with their parents, stared at his gold chain. On another occasion, in the Four Seasons Hotel in Atlanta, I observed two older white women shrink into a corner of the elevator as Will got in. When I remarked on this afterward, Will said, “But here’s the thing, bro—I’m just as scared of them as they are of me. Y’all might get mad at me for smoking weed on the floor or whatnot. Damn! It’s the nigga’s dream to be young, black, and successful. But the nigga’s dream is the American nightmare. These bougies—they don’t know how to take it. They see us coming through the lobby, gold chains, pants sagging, and they’re like, ‘Who the fuck is he?’ Or they say, ‘Damn! How’d he hole up on a floor higher than we?’ Or, ‘Damn! How’s he driving an S63 Mercedes—is he a drug dealer?’ ”
The S63, Mike Will’s ride when he’s in Atlanta, is a top-of-the-line white Mercedes sedan with gold-colored rims and massage seats. “And I got a refrigerator built into the back seat, full of goddam natural organic juices!” Will said. “And they’re going, ‘Did he steal that car?’ Man, this cop pulled me all the way out the car. ‘Tell me the truth—whose car is this?’ ‘Man, it’s mine. Take this license and run these plates and get out of my face.’ ”
In the Fairmont, a well-dressed woman was sitting with her laptop open on the bar, reviewing video footage. Will asked her whether she made films. She said her production company had just finished making an ad for a travel company.
“It’s going to air on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’—I don’t know if you watch that show?” she said, her eyebrows going up quizzically.
Will glanced at the video again.
“What camera do you shoot with?” he asked.
“Oh, we use an Alexa,” the woman said.
“Have you heard of the Red camera?”
“Oh, yes,” the woman said. “That was the best camera, but the Alexa has replaced it.” She helpfully listed the features of the Alexa that made it superior to the Red.
Will wasn’t fazed. “How much does that camera cost?”
“Oh, we don’t buy them! We just rent them,” she replied. “They’re like phones—they get better and cheaper every year.” And with that she went back to her laptop.
By 2013, Mike Will could work with anyone he wanted to. And he has, pretty much. Pharrell Williams got back some of the street vibe of his early Skateboard P days through a collaboration with Mike Will: “Move That Dope,” from 2014. The seed that became Beyoncé’s “Formation” was planted by Swae Lee, one of the Rae Sremmurd duo, and A Pluss, one of Ear Drummer’s staff producers, who has been a friend of Will’s since high school. A Pluss had started the beat back in Atlanta, and Will had it with him on his phone when he was driving from L.A. to the Coachella music festival with Lee and his brother, in 2014.
“So we’re in the middle of the desert,” Will explained. “And we’re just coming up—we just freestyle, you know?—and Swae Lee said, ‘O.K., ladies, now let’s get in formation.’ And we put it on the VoiceNote. Swae Lee’s got so many voice notes that he doesn’t even record, but I’m like, ‘Dog, we got to do that “get in formation” shit.’ That could be a hard song for the ladies. Some woman-empowerment shit. Like, ‘Ladies, let’s get in line, let’s not just fall for anything.’ I’m seeing that vision.” When they got back from Coachella, they booked a studio, and Swae Lee “ended up just laying it down.”
The year before, Will had hoped that he might get to work with Beyoncé. He’d been summoned to New York by Jon Platt, of Warner/Chappell, to work on the track “Beach Is Better,” for Jay Z’s album “Magna Carta . . . Holy Grail.” The collaboration with Jay Z went well, but nothing panned out with his wife. Now Will sent the song, along with five or six others, to Beyoncé and her team. Platt, their mutual publisher, made sure she listened.
A few months after this, Will was in L.A., where he attended a Clippers-Cavaliers basketball game. He knew LeBron James’s agent, Rich Paul, because he’d produced the John Legend song “My Shoes,” which was in the memorable 2013 Nike commercial that showed LeBron running through the streets of Miami. They were staying in the same hotel, and Paul invited Will to join LeBron and his friends after the game. But Will fell asleep in his room. “I woke up at two in the morning,” he said. “And I had some missed calls, and I called Rich back and I was like, ‘My bad, bro, you’re probably in the room by now,’ and he was like, ‘No, we’re still down here.’ So I went down there, and I was chopping it up with LeBron and the Cavaliers, and then Jay Z and Beyoncé just walked up. And this was really like a dream to me. I was just asleep upstairs and now I’m kicking it with Jay Z, Beyoncé, and LeBron. And Bey was like, ‘Yo, I like that “formation” idea.’ And I told her what I was thinking about the woman empowerment, and she was like, ‘Yeah I kinda like that idea.’ And she just left it like that.
“We were just thinking about it being a female anthem,” Will went on. “Because I knew I just wanted a banger with Beyoncé, like a ‘Single Ladies,’ but I wanted it to be a new kind of chant.” Back in New York, Beyoncé wrote verses for the song, but kept the central concept of “get in formation.” The song broadened to become both a Black Lives Matter power anthem and an intimate song about her family.
“Next thing I know,” Will continued, “Big Jon”—Jon Platt—“told me, ‘Yo, this shit’s crazy, you got to hear this.’ ”
Will went to New York and spent a week with Beyoncé in the studio recording the song. Beyoncé, he explained, “took this one little idea we came up with on the way to Coachella, put it in a pot, stirred it up, and came with this smash. She takes ideas and puts them with her own ideas, and makes this masterpiece. She’s all about collaborating.” He added, “That’s what makes her Beyoncé. Being able to know what she wants. A lot of people don’t know what they want. To the point where you can bring them some hot shit, and they’re like, ‘This shit ain’t it. I need a hit, bro.’ And I’m like, ‘Man, this is a hit. If you don’t like this line or that line, you should take this line out and put your own lines in there, and we doctor it up.’ Some people want it cooked. They just want to put a little icing on it and bite it. But it’s really a process to make one of these great songs. It’s layers. Layers and layers and layers.”
Will watched Beyoncé’s performance of his song on the Super Bowl halftime show at Iovine’s place in L.A. with Jimmy and his friends. “I ain’t gonna lie,” he said. “I was with four billionaires watching the TV. I was like, ‘Damn, I got to put more work in. This is only the start.’ For real. It was dope.”
Most of Will’s recent production work with artists not on his label remains unreleased. There is a follow-up to the “Ransom” mixtape, “Ransom 2,” which includes collaborations with Chief Keef, Big Sean, Future, and Young Thug. Will also has two full albums’ worth of his tracks with superstar artists which he hopes to put out in 2016—a pop project, and a vibe record called “Backwoods n Apple Juice,” which he describes as “the best album to smoke and chill to.” The first single from “Ransom 2,” a Rihanna track called “Nothing Is Promised,” dropped in early June.
Mixtapes have long been a feature of the hip-hop world. A mixtape can be made a lot quicker than an album, partly because it’s O.K. if it sounds rough; a mixtape is about catching a “wave,” as Will often describes his music. But perhaps the biggest difference between a mixtape and a studio album is that producers don’t have to clear the samples. Technically, mixtape samples aren’t legally authorized, but since they aren’t for sale there is little cause for action.
Will put out five of them before “Ransom,” in 2014. Fans have been waiting—impatiently, if Twitter comments are any indication—for “Ransom 2,” which was supposed to drop on January 29th. One reason for the delay is that, unlike the previous mixtapes, which were “leaked” for free over the Internet, “Ransom 2” will actually be for sale, which is part of Will’s partnership with Interscope. Will didn’t seem all that happy about this arrangement, but he had little choice but to go along. “I recognize that I am in business with them,” he said.
Will and his co-producers must track down the copyright holders of each sample and negotiate a split of the record’s profits. And, since there is no limit to the size of the split the copyright holders can ask for, many begin with wildly inflated demands—asking for seventy-five per cent of a record’s earnings, say, for the use of a two-second percussion sequence or melody— and hold up the release of the album until they are satisfied. All of which is a new thing for Will and his team, who, despite their precocious success as producers, are still learning when it comes to the finer points of licensing-royalty splits.
“He’s an entrepreneurial guy,” Jimmy Iovine said of Will. “He hustles, he works hard, and he has brilliant ideas. Now it’s all about follow-through. If he can do that, he could have an extraordinary career.”
“I’m learning as I go,” Will said. “This is everybody’s first rodeo. And if the fans can’t see and respect that then they aren’t really a fan.”
Will remained in Los Angeles for several more weeks after I saw him. As it happened, I was passing through Atlanta on the day of his return, and he agreed to give me a lift in the Mercedes S63, which he had left at the airport the month before. The “goddam natural organic juices” in his car refrigerator had been fermenting in the heat all that time, and the interior smelled putrid. Exclaiming, “Goddam, dog, this shit ain’t cool!,” Will drove the car at high speed with the windows down to the apartment of Brian Wright, his marketing manager, where he met a friend who has a mobile car wash.
That night, A Pluss was having a birthday party in a club. Will got a late start—about one-fifteen in the morning. As he entered the club with his retinue, he was immediately shouted out by the d.j.: “Mike WiLL Made-It in the building!” Everyone looked around. The place was a cleaned-out store, with bare concrete floors and walls, some furniture scattered around, and a lot of people dancing, some on tables and couches. Now and then, a rapper would jump up and flow to a beat. Will went up to the booth and played a couple of records, then headed back down.
A guy near the bar, who was dressed all in white, was someone Will had known since his teen-age years in Marietta. He got very agitated that the d.j. had not put on the song he was trying to promote. He was obviously drunk. He got in Wright’s face, and then Will’s friend Tay, who was already at the club, came over, and things looked bad.
“Man, they didn’t give me the microphone to perform!” the guy said.
“You got to understand the difference between pulling and pushing,” Will responded, putting his arm around the guy. “You can’t make people like your shit. You got to have dope music and get people to fuck with your music.” Will talked to him for five minutes or so, and then the place closed and we filed out.
Back in the car, Will expressed his frustration. “He thinks I can do something for him and make that shit hot, but that’s not how it works. You got to be hot.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “ ‘You were hot twelve years ago, and you still going to the same party with the same promoters, trying to get your song played.’ And then him trying to get me to feel his pain! And I feel his pain, but you got to change something up!” ♦
*An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of Mike Will’s sister Chonté.
**An earlier version of this article misidentified the Warner/Chappell employee who arranged Mike Will’s meeting with Peter Edge in New York.
