The Butterfly Effect

through after you finish recording?’ I got in an Uber or a Lyft and headed over. When I got there, they were doing the song ‘For Free?’ ” Kendrick had never seen Glasper play live, but the rapper liked what he saw, and once “For Free?” was finished, he asked the pianist to play on other album tracks. “He told the engineer, ‘Yo, pull up so and so. Pull up ‘Mortal Man.’ Then he’d tell me to play what I heard. So I’d listen once, then I’d play. I did that for eight songs in a row.” In the liner notes for To Pimp a Butterfly, Glasper’s name is listed as a contributor to five tracks, the last of which was “Complexion (A Zulu Love).” “At this point, Thundercat was there. He showed up in a raccoon suit with a tail and everything, but he acted like nothing was wrong,” Glasper remembers with a laugh. “Like, ‘Are you a mascot or… ?’ ” In a separate phone conversation, the producer Mono/Poly—who contributed to the 2016 follow-up, untitled unmastered EP—remembers the same exact story about Thundercat: “Terrace was like, ‘Oh, he’s serious right now,’ kind of joking about it, and for some reason, I was there and I said, ‘Watch, whatever they make today? It’s gonna be a hit. Whatever Thundercat does this day in this studio.’ Even though it was so silly, I just knew everything was gonna work out. That’s when they started adding more to ‘These Walls.’ ” (“These Walls” won a Grammy for Best Rap/Sung Performance.)

Glasper was in the zone for “Complexion (A Zulu Love)”: “They hit record and I played it down. When the tape stopped, I kept going. That was the vibe. I changed the chords a little bit. When I looked up, Kendrick was looking at me through the glass like, ‘Keep going.’ When I walked out of there, he was like, ‘Man, that was dope! On that part I’mma bring a whole new beat onto it and I’mma rap in a different voice.’ That became the Rapsody part. That part happened because I just kept playing. I literally kept playing, which made him say, ‘Oh shit! I’mma add a different bass line and different drums.’ Everything happened so fast—‘Play on this, play on that.’ ” To get Rapsody on the song, Kendrick’s manager, Dave Free, called producer 9^th Wonder, who owns Jamla Records with Rapsody as his featured artist. The idea for Kendrick and Rapsody to work together had been brewing since 2013, a day after the “Control” verse. “9^th hit me like, ‘Dave just hit me, and Kendrick wants to send something.’ I was like, ‘Wow,’ ” Rapsody told MTV News. Then in January 2014, 9^th and Rapsody met at House Studio in Hyattsville, Maryland, and recorded the verse for To Pimp a Butterfly. In keeping with the song’s concept, she decided to fasten the idea of “Complexion” to her own upbringing as a brown-skinned woman in a country preoccupied with hue. “I’m not like the red-bones, ya know?” Rapsody told Vevo. “Light skin… I thought [was] more beautiful when I was growing up. That’s what I saw in the videos. I might be outside playing all day, or my sisters would come in and be like, ‘Ooh, you done got black’… in your head you think something’s wrong with being dark.”

There was so much music being recorded during the Butterfly sessions. And if you were around, even if you played an instrument, Kendrick might snag you to add to the album in other ways. The first voice you hear—after a crackling sample of singer Boris Gardiner’s “Every Nigger Is a Star”—is that of Josef Leimberg, a trumpeter who played on the majority of Butterfly. On “Wesley’s Theory,” he orates the album’s mission statement; on “For Sale? (Interlude),” he’s the antagonist who chastises Kendrick: “What’s wrooong, nigga? / I thought you was keeping it gangsta / I thought this what you wanted.” In an interview, Leimberg says his vocal inclusion was pure happenstance. “He had heard my deep voice, I was talking to Terrace in the studio, and he said, ‘Man, I gotta get that voice on my album,’ ” he recalls. “It wasn’t until weeks later that Terrace called me and said that Kendrick remembered that. He had me come in to do some vocals, some spoken-word shit. He coached me the whole time I was recording those vocals. He knew exactly how he wanted certain inflections here and there.”

Inside the studio, there was a feeling that Kendrick was making a classic, but because he and the guys were so focused on work, they ultimately eschewed any such notions and simply wanted to put out a long-lasting record. Aesthetically, the vibe was different; the studio space was superb, and as Anna Wise remembers, even the food and beverages were scaled up. Gone was the fast food; in were specialty salads and customized menus. The musicians all applaud Kendrick’s genius, saying that he’s a guy who doesn’t rest on his laurels. Yes, he’s talented, but he’s always trying to improve, or at least give the public something it hadn’t heard before. And he didn’t settle for one or two takes on songs. “There are the people who it just comes easy to and there are people who work at it. Kendrick is both,” Kamasi Washington told Pitchfork in 2017. “He can instantly write a song that’s dope as hell, but then spend the time to meticulously work it out and make it perfect. You usually get only one or the other. He’d be sitting there watching me write string parts. Not a lot of people would care.… But he’s always in the studio giving you ideas, and his instincts are incredible.” Upright bassist Miles Mosley agrees. Washington called him to the studio near the end of the recording process to play on “How Much a Dollar Cost” and “Mortal Man.” “He asked me to grab Big Momma, my upright bass,” Mosley recalls. “I threw it in the car