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UPDATE Sept. 19, 2019: Big Boi refuted Thurz’s claims that André has a full project in the works during an interview with Real 92.3, calling it “lies.” “He was probably playing some music, but he’s not working on a record,” Big Boi said. “He’s been recording songs for years. Kinda recording, kinda just stacking up, but structured record? Not yet… He personally hit us and said, ‘Look man, if I was gon’ do this, y'all be the first to know.‘”
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U-N-I veteran Thurz recently stopped by Real 92.3 LA, where he dropped some interesting information about what the ever-elusive André 3000 is up to. “Three Stacks came up in there,” he recalled about recent studio sessions with Anderson .Paak. “He got an album.”
However, Thurz did backpedal a bit, saying André had played “ideas” that sounded like a complete project. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to say that. But he played a lot of ideas that sound like an album to me, so I’m just jumping to conclusions,” Thurz said. “He played a lot of cool ideas. He came in for Anderson. He cut that verse on Ventura and he murdered that shit. But he played some really cool ideas. And he’s making music man. That’s one of my favorite rappers.”
Although fans have been begging André to release a solo album ever since OutKast went on hiatus over a decade ago, the Atlanta rapper has never been fully sold on the idea. In a 2017 interview with GQ, André said that he no longer felt in touch with the pulse of the music industry.
“For me, hip-hop is about freshness. You can always hop, but you won’t always be hip,” he said. “At a certain point, you just won’t. And this is how I know: All the people I grew up with, none of them, not a one, is thriving. Not a one. So that tells me something. I gotta watch that, as someone that’s come in the game and has loved these guys. I mean, loved them. Loved them. But the potency just moves on.”
However, he did say that if he died tomorrow he would regret not putting out a solo effort. “Here’s the only thing that I would regret: Man, you know, there is still that album that you wanted to do,” he told GQ. “Like, I wanted to put out my own project. Things I’ve been working on. But that’s for my personal [satisfaction], you know?”
Recently, the rapper has been spotted playing the flute in random locations around Philadelphia while staying in the city to film AMC’s Dispatches From Elsewhere. Earlier this year, he contributed verses to Anderson .Paak’s “Come Home” and James Blake’s “Where’s the Catch?”
Catch up on all the lyrics to André 3000’s biggest hits on Genius now.
