How Teyana Taylor signed a record deal with Kanye West
Teyana Taylor’s show business career started early. After choreographing the music video for Beyoncé’s ‘Ring the Alarm’ aged just 15, she was signed to Pharrell Williams’ Star Trak imprint — but it didn’t go especially well. Music-wise, things only improved for Teyana after Kanye West entered the scene.
Teyana’s time under Pharrell wasn’t especially fruitful. She released a few singles, but a planned album was ultimately scrapped and her burgeoning pop career stalled. She had many strings to her bow, though, and her interest in fashion was taking her places. It brought her, specifically, into Kanye’s orbit.
After meeting Kanye for the first time during his Glow in the Dark tour, Teyana struck up a friendship with him that was based, more than anything, on their shared love of fashion. “Kanye used to always like my outfits,” she explained to Complex in 2012. “So from jump we became fashion friends and we’d talk about different clothes and designing different things. We’d email each other different garments that we liked. That’s how we became friends and super close.”
But things turned musical during the production of Kanye’s fifth album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. While he was in the studio, Ye invited Teyana over to discuss clothes — but she had other things in mind. She wanted to get on the album, and she had a plan for how to do it.
“Even though the invite really was to check out clothes, I had told myself I was going to get on that album — whether he knew or not,” she recalled, laughing.
Teyana started humming within Ye’s earshot, so he would get a sense of how good a singer she actually was. “Then he started playing his album and I start humming and doing some little runs to what I’m hearing on the sly tip,” she said. “I came in there humming! I knew what I was doing.”
The ploy worked, and Ye liked what he heard. Complimenting her singing, he invited her to perform on the tracks ‘Hell of a Life’ and ‘Dark Fantasy.’ “At the time it was pretty empty, just verses,” Teyana said of the state of ‘Dark Fantasy’ when she was invited to sing on it. “He put me in another room by myself and said, ‘Go.’ I came back with a whole intro and chorus. I did all the scratches and the cuts myself with my voice. That’s not a DJ thing when you hear my voice go like that.”
Teyana admitted that she was “so nervous” when she played her work for Kanye, which, given that Rihanna was apparently there as well, was understandable. But evidently he liked what he heard, and, from there, Teyana’s association with Ye’s GOOD Music label grew. She appeared on Ye’s song ‘Christmas in Harlem’ in late 2010.
In January 2012 word came that Teyana had been released from Star Trak, meaning she was free to restart her music career elsewhere. That summer she signed with GOOD Music, and, two years later, she released her debut album VII. Two more albums, 2018’s KTSE and 2020’s The Album, were also handled by GOOD Music.