Nas says the making of NASIR was anything but intimate. Looking back in a 2020 interview with Apple Music, he said he had to wait until the last week before the album dropped before Kanye West was really in the room to finish the records.
That mattered because NASIR — the 2018 collaboration album between Nas and West — arrived with the kind of expectations that usually come with a major pairing like that. Instead, fans and critics were left asking why it felt flat, even as the sessions took place in Wyoming in 2018.
Nas said he had never been to Wyoming before those recording sessions and thanked West for bringing him there. He said the trip let him see a different part of America and put him around the energy of the producers and artists who were there. But he also said the process never gave him much time with West himself. “This man is cranking out all of these albums, and they’re going to come out every Friday. And so he had to mix albums, finish albums. So I kind of had to wait till the last week before the album dropped to really have him in the room to really have him to be there to get these records done,” Nas said.
He made the same point later that year in an interview with The Breakfast Club, saying he wanted to work more with West but did not get the chance. “I don’t know what went wrong. I did want to work more with [Kanye],” he said. West, he added, was juggling a lot at the time, including projects with Kid Cudi, Teyana Taylor and his own album. “He was working on a lot. He had [Kid Cudi], he had Teyana Taylor, he had his album, and I was the only one coming in starting fresh. So, I had less time with him. We really did that album the week it was supposed to come out,” Nas said.
The timeline helps explain the album’s odd rhythm. Nas said they had ideas and spent time around Wyoming, but that most of the real work came down to the wire in the last week before release. In a year when West was also pushing out other records every Friday, NASIR was one more project squeezed into a crowded run of releases.
That is the tension at the center of the story: the album was presented as a major collaboration, but by Nas’s own account, it was built with limited time and uneven access. The result was a record made under pressure, in the week it was supposed to come out, with one of hip-hop’s most recognizable voices waiting for the producer at the heart of it to finally have room to finish. For listeners who wondered why NASIR sounded rushed, Nas’s answer is plain: it was.
