Meek Mill Barely Got Drake & JAY-Z's Verses For 'Championships'

Meek Mill's fourth album Championships had all the features.

 JAY-Z, Cardi B, Young Thug, Fabolous, Ella Mai, 21 Savage, Kodak Black, Jeremih, PnB Rock, and his friend-turned-foe -turned-friend Drake.

Senior Vice President of A&R at Atlantic Records Dallas Martin helped Meek put together the All-Star lineup. He spoke to Complex about how they just got all of the vocals in before last week's drop date.

"It was down to the wire, buzzer beater," Martin tells Complex about the album's last-minute finish. "The Drake vocals came in on the Tuesday before the Thursday of the release." With a laugh, he adds, "We got the JAY-Z verse the Saturday before the album came out [...] We been wanting JAY on the album since the beginning. With JAY-Z, you can't tell him what to do, when to do it, or how to do it. So you got to pray that the song that he send sticks, he likes it, and he wants to do it. Because nobody can move JAY-Z. When he sent back that 44-bar verse, man, we just all lost our minds. We couldn't believe it, man. It was definitely early Christmas for us."

Martin also spoke on Meek's motivation to have Drake on the project:

I think as an artist he's maturing. I think he just wanted to kind of dead all the bullshit, all the wack beef. I think he wanted to express himself as a leader now, especially what he's representing. He just wanted to show he's a different man and he's in a different space in his life. He don’t want to carrying on no beef that wasn't really over anything serious.