"YEEZUS WAS FINISHED WITH A FLURRY OF LAST-MINUTE, Rick Rubin–guru’d activity—including the random call Leary received from Kanye West’s engineer: “ ‘Kanye’s working on something,’ ” Leary recalls. “ ‘We need rap beats. The blueprint is really experimental. A lot of distortion. Think Nine Inch Nails and contemporary electronics. You’ve got two days.’ ”
He quickly “pulled some stuff out of the bag” to send, and after a week of no response and diminishing hope, an e-mail arrived: “Kanye loves these. He wants to keep all of them.” Leary submitted the files, and after another lengthy silence, a 2 a.m. e-mail offered an invitation just as Leary was ready to shut down his laptop for the night: “Kanye wants you to come to Paris immediately. There’s a flight at 7 a.m. We need you to get on that. We’ll sort everything out, don’t worry about it.”
“We just hung out there for a couple of days working on stuff,” he says. “He was playing me stuff that he had for the record already, like the Daft Punk songs, early versions of those. He showed me around his flat and was just a really nice, warm, welcoming dude.” Working with Kanye was the first time Leary had ever stepped inside a recording studio.
“Outside of having just met this world-famous megastar who I grew up watching videos of, it quickly becomes professional,” he says. “You’re a producer; he’s an artist. You have a shared goal, which is to make a sick electronic album. You get on with it very quickly. It just becomes about music. It doesn’t matter about levels of fame…. Not to say it wasn’t a weird day—a very weird day.”"