What A Time To Be Alive is billed as a Drake and Future album, but it could just as easily be credited to Drake, Future and Metro Boomin. The Atlanta producer executive-produced the project, as well as providing 7 of its 11 instrumentals, largely shaping the overall sound of the project. As Complex points out, Metro talked a bit about the genesis of WATTBA on Rap Radar's latest podcast.
While the dynamic of the album has been described as Drake hopping on Future's wave, Metro feels its something else entirely. “People will always say whatever about anything. Nothing can be perfect and really appease to everybody," he said. "Mostly everybody? Like, I’m cool with the majority. I feel like it is just their own world. I feel like this one project, this is their own world, their own planet. It’s not really Drake jumping into Future’s world, Future jumping into Drake’s world.”
As far as getting everyone together to record, Metro revealed that Drake had been asking him about doing a tape for a while, he just wasn't sure if he was joking. “We’d be in the studio and he’d be like, ‘Yo, we gotta do that tape.’ But he’d be laughing. I don’t know he’d be serious. Like, he would just be talking about me and him. I don’t know what he was talking about. Then we got to the ‘Where Ya At’ video, and the conversation came up again. He was telling Future and Esco, ‘Yeah, I’ve been telling Metro let’s do the tape.’ I was like, ‘Oh shit. Alright, this n----a is pretty serious.’ He was like, ‘Fuck it, we gonna come to Atlanta.’ And two weeks later, we had the studio [Tree Sound] rented out for like six days."
Listen to the full interview below.