“Shania Twain.”
CORRECT.
“Who I have also met. When I first played the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2015, its unofficial godfather, Quincy Jones, was eating his dinner side-stage watching me play. Afterwards, he told me: ‘You’re a bad motherfucker!’ Which I wanted tattooed on my forehead – it’s high praise from Quincy Jones! Anyway, when I returned to Montreux four years later, Quincy Jones was in his eighties and wasn’t travelling as much, and Shania Twain was expressing interest in being his successor. I asked her: ‘Do you want to come up and jam with us?’ and she demurred: ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly…at the most, maybe I could do some back-up vocals’. Fast forward ten minutes into the jam and she’s playing all of her hits and rocking the crowd!”
“Both Drake and I are Canadian, so we grew up on her music. She was our Taylor Swift.”
You’ve collaborated with Drake on numerous tracks including ‘Marvin’s Room’…
“It’s waiting every couple of years for the Drake Phone to ring – an email where he’s asking for new music. He’s in that NBA level of pop/rap music and in the stratosphere, so I have a pretty passive role when it comes to working with him. I’ve been in the studio with him physically three times, and onstage with him once at that Junos, and I’ve been watching his various rap battles and beefs that he’s been going through – the most recent of which [against Kendrick Lamar] he appears to have lost, although I think the deck was stacked against him and I’m sure his career will recover.”
Drake is name-checked on your recent single ‘F*ck Wagner’, a cancel-culture-tackling diss-track against the titular German 19th century poet’s antisemitism (‘He said a Jew poet/ Couldn’t be a true poet/ But have you heard ‘Hotline Bling’?/ A Jew wrote it’). Has he heard it?
“Drake hasn’t given me any feedback on the track yet. My grandfather was my first music teacher, but he was a European supremacist and classical music snob. When he was 11, he told me ‘There will never be a Black Mozart’, but I was watching MTV seeing Prince and thinking, that’s Black Mozart right there. So I had the same thought process when trying to refute Wagner’s claim that Jewish poets can’t be true poets which he wrote in book called Judaism in Music in 1869 at the height of his fame. There are many Jewish poets from Wagner’s era, but I wanted to put a twist on it and Drake is half-Jewish.
“I’ve been thinking of the cancel culture question since my father, who’s Jewish, took me to see Wagner operas. I asked: ‘How can you be a fan of someone who’s saying you’re inferior?’ He said: “I can separate the art from the artist.
“That phrase has been in my mind and as things got heated on this topic recently it made me want to write a song about it. And Kanye’s mental breakdown in which he was spewing some of Wagner’s talking points, whether as a result of trolling or mental illness or sincere beliefs, no one knows, and yet he has doing it in a very public way.”
In the track, you rap: ‘Kanye West is the brand new Wagner’.
“I love Kanye’s music. I still listen to him, even though I’m not proud of it, but it seems I can make the separation when I have an emotional attachment to the music. Everyone has their own line. It’s not as simple as turning an intellectual switch and saying: “I’m never going to listen to this person’s music again’. It’s a nuanced song, despite it being called ‘F*ck Wagner!’”