Pharell Williams was not in the studio when Pusha T needed him most. The beat was ready, the session was waiting, and Pusha had never once been told by his closest collaborator to drop everything and get there. Then came the message: get here or I’m giving it away. What followed was one of the most consequential nights in Virginia rap history, a rewrite demanded three times over, and a record that would take nine months to find its audience before it changed both of their lives permanently.
The friendship that started on a couch at Chad’s house
Growing up in Virginia, the two moved in overlapping orbits early. Pharrell’s clearest memory of the friendship is rapping with Pusha’s brother and gathering at Chad’s house for sessions, where a younger Pusha would eventually fall asleep on the couch. What connected them before any of that, though, was the television. Every morning before school, the two were up watching MTV and BET, cataloguing whatever moved them, whether it was Pearl Jam or Juvenile’s early run. ‘Whatever it was that moved us,’ Pharrell recalled, ‘that was the subject of conversation every morning before school.’ Pusha’s own earliest memory of the friendship takes a more candid turn: they skipped school together, constantly. His actual report card spelled out his performance in initials: E’s for failing, D’s for below average, I’s for incomplete.
Their first visual together was a record called The Funeral, shot by Mark Clasfeld, pulled from the exclusive audio footage album. The song was the two of them eulogizing themselves, written against a backdrop of two or three deaths already surrounding their circle at that point. The suits they wore in the image? Neither of them could remember where those came from.
Six sounds and nine months of waiting
When Pharrell finally arrived at the session that produced Grinding, Pusha made him rewrite his verse three times. That fact alone stops the conversation cold, because as Pusha put it plainly: ‘You’ve never made me rewrite a verse. Ever. Not before or since.’ The record was built around what Pharrell kept calling ‘only six sounds,’ a minimalist instinct he was just entering at the time, shaped in part by Chad. The drums and the cadence were Pharrell’s focus. Nine months passed before Grinding broke through. ‘Someone could have told us, hey man, move on,’ Pharrell said. They did not move on.
Decades later, the record has inspired, among other things, a coffee company the two now share. Pusha credits Pharrell’s relentless expansiveness for that: ‘You’ve taught me to dream big. I’m not surprised we have a coffee company.’
The conversation turned toward a recording session at Louis Vuitton headquarters, with the fashion show running outside the window, Bernard Arnault and the Arnault family in the room, Jay-Z and Beyonce in the audience. Pusha’s brother walked the show. Two chains and whips. Two years after that, the work from those sessions would earn a Grammy alongside Kendrick Lamar. Pharrell called it, simply, ‘one of the most momentous sessions ever. From A to Zed, as they say.’
On the question of where they would rather record, a traditional studio or on a boat in Miami, Pusha did not hesitate: the boat. ‘I never want to make music in a warehouse again.’ Pharrell would take a Rolls-Royce if one was available. The logic is the same either way: if it sounds right in that environment, it will sound right everywhere.
The handwriting nobody expected
Pusha T still writes his lyrics by hand. He estimates twelve or more notebooks, with at least one currently sitting in Paris. Pharrell noted that the handwriting itself is distinctive: every letter equally square, a kind of compressed block print that is entirely his own.
Their mornings begin at 5:00 a.m. Phone calls, studio runs, creative sessions that carry through to around 2:00 in the afternoon. ‘That early morning mental acuity,’ Pharrell said. ‘There’s something that should be studied about that.’
By the time the two finished their conversation for Vogue, they were already back to talking about the grind, the coffee, and getting to the next thing. The same urgency that drove them to Virginia couch sessions and rewritten verses at dawn has not left. As Pharrell put it of the music they have always made together: ‘If it can’t work in those environments, then it doesn’t work.’
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