Words by Gabriel Spadaccini
Chance the Rapper has been riding an enormous high since the release of his third solo mixtape Coloring Book, which, in addition to receiving universal critical and commercial acclaim, made history this past week by becoming the first project to debut in the Top 10 of the Billboard charts based off streaming alone.
The Chicago-born emcee also had a major hand in the production of a number other artists’ projects in the last few months, however, with one of them being The Life of Pablo, Kanye West’s latest record.
According to Chance’s recent cover story interview with Complex, TLOP was originally only supposed to be a ten track project, but the addition of ‘Ultralight Beam’ really “opened up the floodgates” for more material. As the story goes, West let his fellow Chicagoan have free reign in his personal studio for a few hours, and Chance wasted no time in coming up with what eventually became one of our favorite tracks off the final album, ‘Waves’.
Similar to the number of changes to The Life of Pablo’s title (you might remember that the album was even named Waves for a brief period), that original version of ‘Waves’ went through some serious alterations in its studio run. Back in February, literally a day before the official album release, West even tweeted “It’s Chance’s fault the album not out yet… he really wanted ‘Waves’ on that bitch.”
While we’re grateful for Chance’s perseverance in getting Kanye to include the track, there’s no harm in checking out the initial version as well, which is now available courtesy of Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 radio show yesterday. On air, Chance unveiled the original demo of ‘Waves,’ and with his own exalted vocals and some seriously amazing choir arrangements, it seems like he was in the absolute zone writing this song. Whichever version you prefer, the bottom line is that Chance & Kanye is a winning combination. Here’s to more monster collaborations and playing ‘Waves’ as loud as possible.
Check out the original version of the track below. Although the entire interview is great, with Chance riffing on his distaste for record labels and traditional music industry infrastructure, you can skip to the 20:45 mark for Chano’s demo take.
