James Blake asks to be removed from credits of Kanye West’s new album, ‘Bully’
James Blake has revealed that he has asked for his credit to be removed from Kanye West’s new album, Bully.
The record, which was released on March 27th, features a song named ‘This One Here’, with writing credits attributed to Blake, West, Don Toliver, and Quentin Miller.
However, Blake has now asked for his credit to be removed from the track as his original input is now “mostly absent” from the finished product.
Writing in a post to his independent streaming platform Vault, the musician said: “The way I pitched his vocals and construed the track from his freestyle is partially there, majorly peppered with other newer vocal takes etc. But the spirit of my actual production is mostly absent other than that.”
Blake added that he is “happy for the fans but I’ve asked to be taken off the producer credits for now as I don’t want to take credit for other people’s work and this version isn’t what I created with Ye,” referring to the rapper by the title he changed his name to in 2021.
“It’s not personal!”, Blake said in his post. “I just hit a point where [I] don’t want to be credited on music where I can’t affect the end result.”
For his own part, the musician released his latest album, Trying Times, on March 13th.
In a four-star review, Far Out said: “Blake’s previous outings have shown that he can comfortably slip into jazz-tinged neo-soul, trap bangers or ethereal R&B depending on his current mood, but this is an album that amplifies each of these for a song at a time rather than spreads them too thinly.”
Blake has worked with West on a number of different sonic projects for over a decade now, having previously collaborated on a venture called War in 2022, although no music publicly surfaced from it.
It comes after West announced a string of live dates to accompany the release of Bully, with him being set to play the SoFi Stadium in California on April 1st and 3rd.
His European tour, marking his first dates on the continent in some 12 years, will see him visit Arnhem in the Netherlands, as well as France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal this summer.
The Netherlands date attracted controversy among groups campaigning against antisemitism, who told Far Out it was “wrong and premature” for West to perform there after his history of antisemitic comments and actions.
West previously attempted to apologise for this, taking out an advertisement in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year in which he claimed his actions were due to a brain injury.
“I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state, and am committed to accountability, treatment, and meaningful change. It does not excuse what I did though. I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people,” he said at the time.
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