“I love listening to everything,” 6lack says during his EXCLUSIVE interview with HollywoodLife. While discussing his partnership with Johnnie Walker — specifically for their “Black Art Is Forever” event during the Tribeca film festival — 6lack reflected on working with such artists like Rita Ora, Gorillaz, Tinashe, and more. “I just honestly love to be able to go into other people’s worlds, move at their tempo, hear what inspires them, and then figure out how to find my place,” he said. One of those artists whose world he visited was Selena Gomez, joining her for “Crowded Room” off of her Rare album.
With Selena’s fans eagerly awaiting any more word about “#SG3” (technically, her sixth studio album overall), will 6lack reunite with the Only Murders In The Building star on this new project? “That would be dope,” he said. As of right now, I’m not sure. But I’m always down. I was down the first time. I’ll be down again.”
6lack is down to work with similarly minded artists and brands, which explains his partnership with Johnnie Walker and Blacktag — a global platform that aims to create economic empowerment for Black artists and technologists – as well as the brand’s First Strides Creator Grant program, which empowers the economic advancement of Black creators as part of their ‘First Strides’ initiative. 6lack tells HollywoodLife that he has a mind that’s always learning and sharing what he’s learned, especially when working with creatives beyond hip-hop and R&B.
“Whatever I learned [from these collabs], it’s fun to bring it back to my world and say, ‘Okay, well, I did an up-tempo pop song last year,’ and I’m trying to figure out like how to make something with some movement this year,” he tells HL. “I can take what I learned from that song and apply it to this, or I can take what I learned from an Afrobeat song and apply it to this, or I can take what I learned from being on a song with Gorillaz and Elton John, and like discover my voice in a new way that I wouldn’t have discovered on my own. So, always fun to work with other people.”
6lack will also appear on Calvin Harris’s upcoming album, Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 2. The rapper says his song on the album “is such a gem.”
“I recorded the rough draft for that song some years ago,” he says. “It was like, at the very latest, like 2019, 2018, maybe it’s probably like 2018. So, yeah – that was a song that I just had sitting in the back. And I was wondering when he was going to like, re-emerge and to do something with it, because it wasn’t my song. And then, for sure, he popped up and texted me one day. ‘We’re getting ready to drop, and we want to use the song.’ So I’m excited to hear [it, and] I’m excited to hear everybody else’s song.”
Check out the full interview above.