The Grammy Award-winning producer and crafter of ‘The Black Album’ will be bringing us ‘Yeezus’.

A few days ago it was announced that Rick Rubin, who has produced over 50 of some of the great hip-hop, pop, rock and r&b albums over the past 30 years, would be executive producing Kanye’s upcoming release, Yeezus. In an exclusive interview with The Wall Street journal, coinciding with the 31-second clip of a studio session with West, Rubin describes the process of stripping Yeezus down to the minimalist themes ‘Ye was looking for, and the thought process that goes into finishing each track. Check out an excerpt below, and read the entire Q&A here.

-Khari Nixon (@KingVanGogh)

When and why did you join the “Yeezus” project?

Kanye came over to play me what I assumed was going to be the finished album at three weeks before the last possible delivery date. We ended up listening to three hours of partially finished pieces. The raw material was very strong but hadn’t yet come into focus. Many of the vocals hadn’t been recorded yet, and many of those still didn’t have lyrics. From what he played me, it sounded like several months more work had to be done. I joined the project because after discussing what he had played for me, he asked if I would be open to taking all of the raw material on and help him finish it.

How would you describe the new sound he was driving for, and how you did you help him arrive there?

He wanted the music to take a stripped-down minimal direction. He was always examining what we could take out instead of put in. A good example would be the song that became “Bound.” When he first played it for me, it was a more middle of the road R&B song, done in an adult contemporary style. Kanye had the idea of combining that track with a cool sample he had found and liked – I removed all of the R&B elements leaving only a single note baseline in the hook which we processed to have a punk edge in the Suicide tradition.