Kendrick Lamar Shares What It's Like Collaborating With Taylor Swift

Lamar joined Howard Stern for a lengthy chat about "Bad Blood," Prince, fast food, and aliens.

Kendrick Lamar
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Photography by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Clara Lionel Foundation

Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar made his Howard Stern Show debut Tuesday, chopping it up with the broadcasting mainstay about everything from his first phone conversation with Dr. Dre to his 2015 collaboration with Taylor Swift.

"You gotta have great business mind and integrity and a great team," Lamar said of what he takes into consideration when saying yay or nay to a collab. "The No. 1 thing we talk about is how does the music sound, how far in the pop world is the sound. So the first thing is, let's hear the music because the music is going to dictate the idea and the concept of where can we take this idea."

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For "Bad Blood," Lamar and Swift linked at a studio in Los Angeles and just got right to work. "We both was in L.A., so I came to her studio session," he said. "She had the music up and I started writing and jumped in the booth and we laid it down." Swift didn't offer any direction on the track's overarching theme, with the two instead choosing to simply vibe and capture the results.

"With this particular record, it was me just vibing and catching her lyrics," Lamar said. "I didn't want to get into her head too crazy. I just wanted to have my own inspiration and see where it took it . . . Fortunately, the vibe was right and it didn't take too many takes and we was really locked in on the chemistry and we really felt what was going on when I was in the booth."

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Stern and Lamar also discussed the importance of fast food, nearly collaborating with Prince, and more:

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Elsewhere, the conversation veered into extraterrestrial visits and his desire to land a collab with Anita Baker:

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Last week, Lamar semi-surprised us with the official collectors edition of his Grammy-nominated album Damn. As expected, the entire concept behind the collectors version of Damnis fucking brilliant.

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