It seemed Kendrick’s heart was in the right place; that he couldn’t save everyone was eating him alive. That explains a song like “u,” a moody, two-part saga near the album’s middle that walks listeners right into the hotel room where Kendrick almost lost himself. It’s easily the rapper’s most vulnerable track, with raw lyrics delving into the suicide he contemplated, and the younger sister he couldn’t guide. She got pregnant with her first child as a teenager, and Kendrick blamed himself for letting it happen: “Where was your antennas? / Where was the influence you speak of? / You preached in front of one hundred thousand but never reached her.” On the song, Kendrick rhymes from the perspective of a naysayer, possibly a close friend or family member, or even the negative voices in his own head. Kendrick simply couldn’t quell the doubt that laid heavily on his heart, and “u” depicted the mood swings he battled, and the frayed relationships that he had trouble restoring. The session for that song was disturbing. “He just walked in, turned all the lights off, and he walked into the booth,” engineer Ali told Revolt TV. “And he didn’t come out for three hours.” Said Sounwave, “Everyone who walked in that session had tears in their eyes.”
The tracks were just about done for To Pimp a Butterfly when Terrace Martin called in his friends to add live instrumentation to the beats. One time in particular, the musician was in the studio playing the music of Willie Bobo, a legendary Latin and jazz percussionist, when the sound caught Kendrick’s ear. “He walks in one day like, ‘What is that?’ ” Martin recalls. “He’s like, ‘That shit dope!’ ” Then the two started talking about jazz when Martin asked Kendrick if he’d seen Mo’ Better Blues, the 1990 Spike Lee film in which actor Denzel Washington plays a fictional New York jazz trumpeter named Bleek Gilliam. Kendrick hadn’t seen the movie, so they watched it. There’s a scene near the end where Spike Lee’s character, Giant, is assaulted in the alley behind the nightclub as the band plays a frenetic jazz breakdown onstage, all drum fills, undulating bass, and surging trumpet wails. “Our eyes opened up because the power of that music got the point across real quick. Because of that music, that scene was so intense,” Martin says. “Kendrick was like, ‘Man, we need to do some shit like that.’ ”
That night, the producer drove to his home in Porter Ranch and wrote a song similar to what they’d heard in the pivotal Mo’ Better Blues scene. But he didn’t want to use a drum machine or anything synthetic. He played a demo on his baby grand piano and texted the file to Kendrick: “I wanted to give him a melody that felt like some type of alarm clock, like tension was building.” Over the next couple of days, Martin got the musicians together: Robert “Sput” Searight on drums, Brandon Owens on bass, Craig Brockman on organ, Marlon Williams on guitar, and Robert Glasper on piano. “Kendrick walked into the session and we started playing that motherfucker,” Martin recalls. “Everyone’s eyes lit up in the whole room. Everybody there was like, ‘What the fuck is this?!’ I felt good about the music, but when I saw him happy, I said, ‘I’m ’bout to really go in on this motherfucker.’ It was recorded in one take. That’s how we made ‘For Free?’ ” Martin left and came back to the studio an hour later; by then, Kendrick had started putting words to it. “This. dick. ain’t. freeee,” Martin recalled in his best Kendrick voice. “And I said, [gasp] ‘Oh my God.’ We ’bout to piss these motherfuckers off. I said, ‘Thank God, it’s about to get uncomfortable for people.’ And I loved that.”
Though Martin resists taking credit for To Pimp a Butterfly’s jazz-leaning sound, he was responsible for bringing in some of the genre’s biggest names. Before that record, a name like Robert Glasper’s wasn’t well known in the mainstream, even if his 2012 LP, Black Radio, won the Grammy Award for Best R&B Album. He was hip-hop’s best-kept secret, and only one of two guys—trumpeter Roy Hargrove being the other—who blurred the lines between rap, jazz, and soul, and made it cool for younger people to embrace older genres of music. In the mid-2000s, Glasper worked with famed rappers like Mos Def and Q-Tip, and alongside soul mavens like Erykah Badu, Maxwell, and Bilal. He could perform it all: at the helm of the Robert Glasper Trio, he skewed closer to hard bop and traditional covers; as leader of the Robert Glasper Experiment, he became more electronic and abstract, blurring the lines among jazz, rock, and electronica. But while Glasper’s name rang bells with niche audiences, he wasn’t considered a mainstream star at first. “I was known as the ‘crossover dude,’ ” he says today. “I’m the first non-singing R&B artist to win the Grammy for Best R&B Album. When I won, it gave everyone a different kind of hope, like, ‘Oh, we can do outside-of-the-box stuff.’ But when To Pimp a Butterfly came, it was perfect timing for everyone involved.” Working with Kendrick gave him the chance to ascend in his own career. “When good kid, m.A.A.d city came out, I was obsessed with that record. I told Terrace, ‘Bro, for the next record you gotta get me on something,’ ” Glasper recalls. At the time, Glasper was working on his Black Radio follow-up, Black Radio 2, and asked Martin to introduce him to Kendrick because he wanted to get the rapper on a track.
The pianist soon traveled to L.A. to record a live album called Covered at Capitol Studios. Once there, he got a call from Martin. “He was like, ‘Yo, you still here in L.A.? I’m at Dr. Dre’s studio with Kendrick right now. We need you for this song. Can you come
