Only (Remix)

This song wasn't originally planned for the album but came about when G'zay called me one afternoon in December 2021 and pitched me the idea. His proposal is what sparked the idea of expanding the original tracklist I had laid out, in a similar vein to Les étoiles vagabondes by Nekfeu and its extended version. However, since I only wanted to add 5 songs to my album (compared to the 16 that Nekfeu added to his), I figured I might as well take what I thought could be the extended version of my album and make that the final tracklist.

When G'zay pitched me his idea, I'd already heard some of the songs he had done with Don Poppa, most of which are stylistically similar to "Only", so agreeing to it was something I only had to think through for a few minutes. I decided to give him full creative control and let him do whatever he wanted with it, hoping it would produce something different to the original, then make my own adjustments from there.

It wasn't until late July 2022 that G'zay sent me what he called a "skeleton mix" of the track (because he was quite ill at the time, so his ear wasn't as sharp as usual). For me, the ideas were there but the arrangement wasn't, so I got to building on that skeleton and re-arranging the track, then sending him new stems to work with. Less than two weeks and some fine-tuning later, the song was done and I absolutely loved it.

As we began to finish the song, I had the idea of sampling the Man Talk KE podcast episode with Bien-Aimé Baraza, because I felt the previous outros we had done were missing something. I reached out to Oscar (one of the podcast's hosts) on Instagram, which was simple since he was already following me and had reacted to some content I'd put up previously. He and Eli both enjoyed the song and had no problem allowing me to use the sample.