LAST CALL
karriem riggins tells us how he finished J Dilla’s The Shining.

When we started the album we did four live joints, and [Dilla] wanted to spit on two of them. The first one is the one with MED [“Jungle Love”]. It was initially just MED on there and J was gonna spit his verse, so I got Guilty Simpson on and we mixed it [with] Dave Cooley. And the second one was “Love Movin’” with Black Thought. Initially he was gonna spit on that, and I got Thought to complete the joint. So that’s basically why it was incomplete, it was not mixed and some of the joints he was gonna spit on, he didn’t get a chance to.

As far as the song structure, he basically had it down [but] some of the songs were incomplete. The stuff that he did was pretty much where he wanted it, so there wasn’t much to do but enhance it slightly. We actually didn’t have enough songs to put the album out so we added the one with Common and D’Angelo [“So Far So Good”]. J really wanted to work with D’Angelo so it just fit perfectly...
as told to jesse gissen

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