INTERVIEW: Zaytoven Reveals Jay Z’s Reactions When He Played Him Beats

Originally posted on HipHopDX 2/16/2017

What are the odds that Zaytoven appears on Jay Z’s next album? According to Zay, they’re pretty favorable. One of the South’s most prolific producers (Gucci Mane, Migos, Soulja Boy, you name it) to ever grace the studio recently checked in on #DXLive to give the scoop. “I met him once,” Zaytoven says. “We were talking about regular life stuff most of the time. We were talking about his daughter [and] we were talking about the election, things like that.”

It wouldn’t take long for the conversation to turn to music. “Then we start talking about music. He was letting me know what artists he likes. I was asking him who [is] he feeling in the game,” Zaytoven recalls. “Then it got down to ‘I got these beats I need to give you.’”

But it wasn’t Zaytoven who reached out for the connection; it was Jay who put the word out that he was looking for Ziggy. “ ‘I heard you were looking for me,’ “ Zaytoven recalls telling Jay Z. “I came prepared.”

When asked about Jay Z’s reaction to his music:

“It’s the reaction I always want to get. When we got to the third track he was like, ‘Hold up. Play that one again.’ That’s when I [knew] I got his attention. I knew what he wanted so I had like 25 beats on [the CD]. He was like ‘Give me all [of] them’” To the dismay of what we know Zaytoven for producing, he says that the beats he let Jay Z hear weren’t trap. “It’s not really trap beats. I think guys at that level, they just not looking for [my] signature sound. They want someone with [a] signature sound but they want something that’s a little different and I make a lot of different tracks. A lot of times people want the sound that sounds like Gucci Mane and other times people want the melody driven tracks that Future raps on. With Jay, I guess what he was looking for was kind of the more melody driven [tracks]. So I picked out all the ones I feel that had the piano [and] strings but were still hitting hard.”

With a thumb drive of a quarter of 100 beats from Zaytoven in his possession, it’s safe to say that the next Jay album will have a direction that we may not have heard from or expected. Keep it locked on HipHopDX all of your Zaytoven and Jay Z developments and on Facebook/HipHopDX every Thursday for a new edition of #DXLive.