A day after Kendrick Lamar surprise-released untitled unmastered, the co-producers behind one of the album's standout tracks still couldn't definitively identify all of the voices on their own song. Lamar himself, sure. The honeyed pipes of guest vocalist CeeLo Green? Unmistakably so. Still, Los Angeles composer/producer Adrian Younge, who worked on "untitled 06 | 06.30.2014" alongside A Tribe Called Quest's Ali Shaheed Muhammad, told Pitchfork he hadn't figured out yet if any other voice might be present.
Muhammad, also on the phone, added, "It sounds like there's somebody else, but I mean, that's a question for Kendrick."
Younge's solution was simple: He texted Lamar to ask. This information gap illustrates the long, slow process that give birth to "untitled 06," a track that shifts between bossa nova and vintage soul, as CeeLo and Lamar wax profound on romance that's both idiosyncratic and unconditional. "I can explain," the Gnarls Barkley/Goodie Mob vocalist sings here, and the track's origins bear some explanation.
"I think it's wonderful," CeeLo told Pitchfork of Lamar's final product, in a separate interview. "I think he's wonderful. And I think it's wonderfully timed."
The roots of "untitled 06" can be traced to a time before Lamar was a household name. Muhammad and Younge formed a friendship after Muhammad heard Younge's score for the 2009 blacksploitation send-up Black Dynamite. "I honestly thought it was an old movie," Muhammad recalled. "I didn't know it was something so modern." They first worked together on Souls of Mischief's There Is Only Now, but the track that would eventually become fodder for the To Pimp a Butterfly mastermind started out in 2013 as a demo for an upcoming album Younge and Muhammad have planned as a duo, to be titled The Midnight Hour.
The two recorded the song's instrumental to tape at Linear Labs in Los Angeles, working with drummer David Henderson and acoustic guitar player Jack Waterson, both members of Younge's Venice Dawn band. Along with drums and guitar, the arrangement includes Rhodes organ, vibraphone, and bass, all recorded using classic instruments and vintage microphones. "It's all live but everything on that, all the instrumentation, is recorded to analog so it has a vintage patina to it," Younge said. "It has a certain kind of flavor to it."
For the bossa nova element, Younge credits Muhammad. "Ali was like, 'Yo, let's go bossa nova.'" Younge told Pitchfork. "I had done bossa nova stuff before, but the kind of bossa nova stuff I was doing was like, really slow, mood shit. But when you said to go upbeat on that, I remember that distinctly and that started a whole new lane for us. For me personally it reminded me of Ali's spirit within Tribe. That's something that Tribe would do. What's the bossa nova shit you guys sampled?"
Muhammad replied, "'Technova' by Towa Tei."
CeeLo had known Muhammad for a while, given their deep mutual roots in hip-hop, and became friends with Younge after seeing the producer on an episode of the documentary series Unsung focused on Philly soul group the Delfonics, whose 2013 album Younge oversaw. Younge, Muhammad, and CeeLo were in talks about a collaboration, and the production duo sent the singer a number of demos to see what he could do with them.
"I got sent 10 or 12 ideas of random, brilliantly produced Adrian and Ali collaborations, but this one spoke to me," CeeLo said. Originally titling the song "Question Marks," he wrote and sang his part for the track, which he saw as "a romantic-comedy kind of satire" involving "an eccentric individual, unique and peculiar but intriguing and attractive." The lyrics, he said, were initially "more just like a conversation with a woman."
"Question Marks," CeeLo added, was "initially was an incentive" for Younge and Muhammad to move forward on their prospective collaboration with him. Younge confirmed this account, adding: "Honestly, CeeLo wrote that to show Ali and I what he can do. Imagine CeeLo calling you and saying, 'Yo, I finished that track,' and I'm like, 'All right, gonna listen to it and hit him back.' When I heard it, I was blown away. How I felt is arguably the same way Kendrick must have felt when he heard it."
A mutual friend, Sam Taylor of music publishing company Kobalt, had connected Muhammad and Younge with Lamar, who heard "Question Marks" along with some other demos and "just said, 'I need this, let me have this,'" Younge recalled. "And then he created ['untitled o6.']"
The date in the Lamar song title, a conceit shared by other tracks on untitled unmastered, is one the producers and guest vocalist couldn't explain. But they were unanimous in their praise for the finished results. Lamar "completed the thought," CeeLo said. "He did an exceptional job."
CeeLo first heard "untitled 06" along with the rest of us on the night of its release, while Muhammad and Younge heard it about a week earlier. But all have connections to Lamar that precede the new album. CeeLo first met Lamar a few years ago and "considers him to be cut from the same cloth." Younge remembered meeting Lamar during the rapper's L.A. tour stops with Kanye West in October 2013. Muhammad said he first met Lamar when the MC made an unannounced appearance at a Younge show just last May.
"And it was just so hectic backstage with him being there because it was supposed to be a surprise, so they were just trying to get him in the door without him being seen and we just locked eyes as he was walking in," Muhammad said. "He grabbed my head, I grabbed his head. We touched heads. We couldn't even have full words. There was such mutual respect in that moment."
In between the recording of "Question Marks" and the release of "untitled 06," CeeLo also made headlines outside of the recording studio. In August 2014, he pleaded no contest to felony charge of providing a woman with ecstasy and was sentenced to three years of probation plus 45 days of community service. The unidentified woman had claimed she woke up naked in CeeLo's bed; CeeLo's lawyers claimed sex was consensual, and no sex-related charges were filed. Shortly afterward, CeeLo issued and then deleted a series of controversial tweets about rape, later apologizing for what he called his "highly irresponsible" tweets.
Asked about how people might receive the romantic-entreaty aspect of "untitled 06" in light of the no-contest plea, CeeLo seemed surprise. "I didn't really even make any immediate association between those two things," he said. "No, no, no. I'm not receiving anything negative about it, nor do I feel anything negative toward anyone who had felt a certain way a few years ago. I would assume that time in life has gone on, and they have bigger fish to fry."
Younge said he spoke to CeeLo about the situation when it happened but didn't press him for details about the allegations. "I know CeeLo as a good dude," Younge said. "Ali's known him for a long time. And it was one of those things where he was definitely disappointed in that entire situation, in a very respectful way. It's one of those things, for us, people make mistakes and I honestly don't know exactly what mistake he made because we don't know the facts. But for the kind of person that he is, if he did do what they're alleging that he did, he's definitely remorseful for it. But I don't even know what he actually, actually, actually, did, because it's allegations."
In November 2015, CeeLo released his first solo album in five years, Heart Blanche. He's currently on tour with dance-pop ensemble Escort. And he sings on Rick Ross's 2015 album, Black Market. "I'm having a highly productive and positive re-entry into the game," he said. "I'm in a really good space, and things are coming around, and I'm very fortunate."
The journey of the song that became "untitled 06" isn't over either, since the version of "Question Marks" that Lamar transformed into his own was supposed to be a demo. Younge and Muhammad said a completed "Question Marks," still with CeeLo, will appear on their joint album, The Midnight Hour, which they expect to release later this year. "If people like this song with CeeLo, then they'll definitely love what we're doing," Younge said.
He and Muhammad also revealed that they're scoring a yet-to-be-announced TV project, which is set to debut this year and has a full orchestra conducted by Brainfeeder associate Miguel Atwood-Ferguson.
Lamar sent his text confirming himself and CeeLo as the sole voices on "untitled 06" while Younge and Muhammad were still on the line with us. "He said it's something he did back with To Pimp a Butterfly, and knew it would eventually have a life," Younge read aloud. "He wanted this project, this song, to be raw and lucid. He believed it had its own legs. 'It's that good of a song.' And that was from Kendrick."