What’s it like being friends with Drake, Anderson.Paak, and having your music referenced on blockbuster albums from Kendrick Lamar, Jay Z and Beyoncé? You’d have to ask Nai Palm, frontwoman for Hiatus Kaiyote.
The Melbourne-based future-soul band have been sampled on Kung Fu Kenny’s DAMN., The Carters’ surprise album EVERYTHING IS LOVE, and most recently, Nai plays an important role on Drake’s double album Scorpion. She features on ‘Is There More’, delivering a re-harmonised take on the Aaliyah classic ‘More Than A Woman’, which functions as the segue between the tougher Side A into Side B’s smoother RnB introspection.
So how did this hook-up happen? Well, Nai got to meet Drizzy IRL in Melbourne late last year, during the OVO lord’s Australian tour. They hit it off immediately and began trading musical ideas.
"We’ve been homies since November. He sends me a bunch of stuff to work on - it was maybe nine songs all up,” the 29-year-old tells triple j from a studio in Byron Bay, where Hiatus Kaiyote are recording a new album.
Drake, a documented fan of Nai's solo album Needle Paw, also sampled Hiatus’ 2015 song ‘Building A Ladder’ to open his 2016 project More Life.
"We’re really tight. We’ve been talking to each other, minimum every week since November. Sometimes it’ll be 6am, driving home from the studio and he’s literally just made something. It was very natural, just bouncing ideas off each other.”
“He picked up pretty quickly that I’m not going to sell his shit to buy a yacht. It’s a mutual respect thing. We just hit it off and both trust each other and, if anything… You know the nervous artist talk before you want to show somebody something? It was really funny to get that from him: ‘It’s not finished’, ‘I need to work on it more’ – I’m like, ‘shut up’. It‘s really beautiful seeing somebody that seasoned still be shy about his art.”
Hearing her “throwaway recording” of Aaliyah turn up on Scorpion was a welcome surprise, says the frontwoman. “I didn’t officially know [I was on the album] until his lawyers hit up my publishers."
In short, it was a collaboration that blossomed from a “weird, beautiful friendship”, and a far more personal experience than other high-profile hook-ups she and the Grammy-nominated band have gone through.
For example, Jay Z and Beyoncé’s joint album as The Carters was a project so top secret that they refused to e-mail the Hitaus-featuring track, ‘713’, for fear of it leaking. “To clear the sample, we could only listen via a five-way international phone call. Just the worst quality,” she laughs.
Ultimately however, Nai is blown away by how these blockbuster artists have interpreted Hiatus Kaiyote’s music.
“That Kendrick Lamar song [‘DUCKWORTH.’], that’s my favourite song on the whole album. The Carters track: hearing Beyoncé sing one of my vocal runs, it actually made me cry. She’s singing things that I wrote when I was 19 or whatever, it’s a trip!”
If that wasn’t enough, Nai also counts Anderson.Paak as a “dear friend”.
“We send each other stuff all the time too. I’ve written to stuff of his and he’s written to stuff of mine.”
She’s known the .Paak man from way back, when he was just a session drummer, before he even began singing and rapping. So, she’s got some insider knowledge on Anderson’s upcoming, Dr Dre-assisted solo album.
“He’s definitely got some gold that I know he loves. Either it’s on this release or the next release, you never really know. I’m so proud of him. He’s eating the world and it’s a wonderful thing.”
Here’s some other fascinating takeaways from the interview:
- We could hear more Drake material at some point:
"I’m assuming he’ll probably use some stuff… I have sent him something that he wants to write to but I’m not sure if it’s the right thing. It's not like, 'we've ticked that box'. It's an ongoing, dynamic relationship." - Nai helped expand Drizzy's musical horizons:
"We’re both very different artists. Hiatus is super-detailed and nerdy, references a lot of shit. He’s very good at directness and simplicity, it was a really massive learning curve, I think for both of us. I’d send him random Mongolian Orchestral recordings and shit.” - On the time she met Pharrell Williams:
"Pharrell is one of the most humble people I’ve ever met. The context of me meeting him was the Grammys Red Carpet (in 2015). ‘Get Lucky’ and ‘Happy’ had come out, the time he had that giant hat on. It was his year, everyone wanted to talk to him, and he came up to me and had a good solid chat about the future of music and was so genuine and generous." - Hiatus Kaiyote's follow-up album to 2015's Choose Your Weapon is coming along nicely:
"The stuff we’ve come up with is so gorgeous, definitely an evolution. Hopefully going to have it done by the end of the year. We're just allowing ourselves the luxury of sinking into it, as far as studio time, putting in the groundwork to make it as beautiful as we want."