Mustard is riding high off the success of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which gave the Cali bounce producer his first Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit.
The Los Angeles native pulled up to Billboard News recently to put the whirlwind of the last couple of months into perspective. Mustard was wondering how he was going to pick up a buzz heading into his album, before the Drake-dissing “Not Like Us” seemingly fell out of the sky in May and gave him an ace in the hole.
Mustard had long wanted to land a placement with Kendrick Lamar to the point that he’d pepper the Compton rap dignitary with five beats at a time on some days.
“I keep saying it and I can’t say it enough — it’s gotta be God,” Mustard says, crediting a higher power. “What am I gonna do to get myself back hot? … How are we gonna spark to where people are like, ‘I wanna hear Mustard again.’ … Then the song came out. There’s my rollout.”
He continued: “I’ve been literally trying to get a song with him for years… Before I even made that beat, I got to a point where I was like, ‘I’m gonna send five beats a day.’ I maybe sent him five beats a day for maybe three months. I’m still doing it right now just in case he wants to record something. I sent him that beat and then I think that day I would make it a point just to go to the studio to make a couple of beats to send to him.”
Mustard cooked up the “Not Like Us” beat and sent it over to Kendrick in early April before running to his manager’s birthday dinner.
“I started chopping it up and I sped it up and I did the drums and I was like, ‘This is fire.’ … I sent him the beat and I was going to my manager’s birthday party and that was April 6,” he recalled. “He never responded until 12 at night and was like, ‘This is fire.’”
Mustard admitted: “I don’t think I even understood how big it was until it went No. 1 (on the Billboard Hot 100). I was like, ‘This is the biggest song I ever had in my life.’ I just wanted a song with Kendrick.”
The 10 Summers Records boss is rolling into his upcoming album, Faith of a Mustard Seed, which he revealed was named by the late Nipsey Hussle. He continued the album rollout on last Friday (June 21) with the release of “Parking Lot” feat. Travis Scott.
“When I was doing Perfect Ten, I remember the last conversation I had with Nipsey, he was telling me to name that album Faith of a Mustard Seed,” he added. “We talked for hours that night and I always kept that in the back of my head.”
Watch the full 20-minute interview with Mustard below, which also finds him touching on the losses he’s recently endured, how it was to work with legends like Mariah Carey and Rihanna, plus much more.
