Conway The Machine had to adjust to the rules of the “Donda” sessions.
As fans eagerly await the arrival of his forthcoming studio album God Don’t Make Mistakes, Conway The Machine has stopped by Complex to talk about the project as well as offer insights on some of his career-defining moves over the past year. Naturally, his feature on Kanye West’s Grammy-nominated album Donda came up during the conversation, and Conway delivered a lot of gems, from how the Ye connection came to be to the strict rules that were enforced during the Donda sessions.
According to Conway, Griselda was doing a show in Los Angeles when Ye reached out to the team and invited them to one of his Sunday Service shows. They eventually linked up with the “Hurricane” hitmaker in the artist area, where they all quickly hit it off. “Kanye, you know how he is. He’s just kind of spur of the moment, and he just got a feeling like ‘Yo, man. We should just go right now to Cabo and just work on some music!’” Conway reveals. “Obviously, me and Benny, we have some stipulations that prevented us from leaving the country so freely, so we ended up going to the ranch in Wyoming.”
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Once Conway arrived at the ranch, however, he quickly found himself outside of his element during the Donda sessions. At Ye’s studio, drugs, alcohol, and phones were prohibited, regulations that made the studio sessions “different” for Conway The Machine.
“At first it was kind of different for me because I didn’t really grow up in the church world,” the La Maquina artist explained. “And I’m used to studio sessions where it’s the homies around. It’s niggas smoking, it’s niggas drinking. You got ladies over here. You got niggas smoking over there, shooting dice.”
“And this one — ain’t no smoking, no drinking, no nothing,” Conway says. “You can’t even have your fucking cell phone in the motherfucker. It was kind of weird at first. Not weird, just different the first couple days. But, you know, it was nothing for me. At the end of the day, I was just happy and blessed to even be welcomed in that man’s atmosphere.”
See Conway The Machine’s full interview with Complex below. The Griselda artist starts to discuss his Donda feature around the 9:22 mark.