Ryan Leslie Explains Work On Jay-Z & Kanye West's "Watch The Throne"

R. Les is the latest to contribute to the highly anticipated album.

Jay-Z and Kanye West have already worked with a handful of musicians and producers for Watch the Throneincluding Lex Luger, Jeff Bhasker and G.O.O.D. Music’sHit-Boy. The latest to join the project is singer-songwriter Ryan Leslie, who explained that his world tour has coincided with the international studio sessions for the forthcoming project.

“Man, that project is really coming together pretty awesomely. I’ve been touring kind of around the world everywhere where they’ve been doing it as well, so we did a week in England, we did a week in Australia, we did a week in New York City and we did a week in Paris too,” he said during an interview on BET’s “106 & Park.” “So there’s so much awesome music that’s happening on that album and I think everybody’s going to be really excited.”

The “Glory”  singer also shared what lessons he’s gleaned from working with Hov.

“I learned that if you really want to be the best, you’ve got to be better than the best. And it’s really hard to be better than Jay-Z because he really has a 24-hour-a-day schedule,” he explained. “So he’ll wake up, he’ll do a morning television show, he’ll do a bunch of lunch meetings, he’ll go do a concert with U2 and then come to the studio and be the last one out the studio. So that means I’m always in competition with him to make sure I’m the last one out of the studio after him.”

-STEVEN J. HOROWITZ