Kanye West has spent the last few months curating and producing projects from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Out there, in the middle of nowhere, 'Ye had the idea to keep the projects short. For whatever reason Kanye does things, he decided that seven songs was the number he wanted for each of the projects. Everyone except Teyana Taylor stuck to that plan (she has eight songs on her project), which left many fans asking for more content. It's better to have the fans asking for more music than being exhausted with too much though, and that may have been a concept Jay-Z thought about when making 4:44.
Producer No I.D. sat down on TIDAL to break down Jay-Z's last album, which he fully crafted himself. When speaking about the track "Legacy," No I.D. revealed that the project was initially meant to hold seven tracks. "This might have been the second or third record we did," he says of "Legacy." "And he immediately said this would be the outro. Ironically, we were trying to do a seven-song project. The irony of it all, right?" The album expanded to a couple extra songs because No I.D. was creating too many hits for Jay to pass up. "But it just kept spilling over to more songs and he loved Donny Hathaway," he explains.