Lil Wayne has confirmed, in his own words, a piece of rap folklore that has floated around for years: he threw out his first verse on “Forever,” the 2009 posse cut with Drake, Kanye West and Eminem, after hearing what Eminem had recorded. Asked about it on Tyrann Mathieu’s podcast In The Bayou, in a full episode posted on Tuesday, October 20, Wayne answered “Yeah. Yeah,” and then explained what had been missing.
“I’m sure there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with it,” he said of the original. The problem, as he described it, was intent. “I felt like I wasn’t going hard,” he told Mathieu and co-host Tyrell McCall, saying the first draft dealt with general topics rather than knocking heads off and claiming the top spot. Eminem’s verse, he said, worked on him like “a drug or something.” Then came the request to pull his part and start again, which he remembers with obvious pleasure: “I can’t wait to do a new version,” he recalled thinking. “I hope he love it.”
Two rewrites, one reason
Wayne was not the only one. Kanye West has said that once he heard Eminem’s verse on the Drake record, he went back and spent two days rewriting his own, canceling appointments to do it. Eminem’s explanation for why his part landed so hard was technical rather than competitive: he said everyone approached the beat differently, and that he heard it as a double-time beat, so he rapped faster.
That is the whole mechanism in one detail. Boi-1da’s production moves at 80 beats per minute, a slow, heavy pocket. Rapping in double time over it means fitting twice as many syllables into each bar, which made Eminem’s section sound like a different gear from the verses around it. Two of the biggest names in rap then heard that gear and decided their own drafts would not survive next to it.
How “Forever” came together
The beat had a life before Drake. A short timeline:
- Early 2008: Boi-1da’s track is first used by Kardinal Offishall on an unreleased song, “Bring It Back,” and later resold to Drake.
- Late 2008: an early version, “I Want This Forever,” leaks with Lil Wayne and Kidd Kidd on it.
- August 27, 2009: the official four-man “Forever” arrives as the third single from the soundtrack to More than a Game, the documentary about LeBron James, and later lands on Eminem’s Relapse: Refill.
- September 2009: it debuts at No. 8 on the US Hot 100, and goes on to peak at No. 2 on the R&B and hip hop songs chart and tops the rap songs chart.
- 52nd Grammy Awards: Drake performs it with Wayne, Eminem and Travis Barker.
The leak raises a fair question Wayne did not settle on the podcast: whether the verse he scrapped is the one fans heard on “I Want This Forever,” or a different draft recorded once the four-man version took shape. He talked only about an “original verse” and the new one, so the exact draft remains his to identify.
The numbers since then show why the story keeps resurfacing. “Forever” had sold 3,265,000 digital copies in the US by April 2013, Drake’s first single to pass three million. It is now certified Diamond in the US, a level that represents 10 million units, so the song’s tally roughly tripled once streaming was counted alongside downloads. Wayne’s admission comes more than 17 years after the single’s release, long enough that many current listeners discovered the song as a classic rather than as a new record.
What working with Eminem meant to Wayne
This is not the first time Wayne has spoken about Eminem with something close to nerves. In a 2023 interview marking hip hop’s 50th anniversary, he said: “I was scared, actually, when I called Eminem for a song.” He described Eminem as “a monster,” a writer who shares his own obsession with words, rhymes and their meanings. The two kept working together after “Forever,” on “Drop the World” from Wayne’s Rebirth and “No Love” from Eminem’s Recovery, both in 2010.
On the podcast Wayne framed the whole episode as fun rather than pressure, saying he “enjoyed every second” of it. He also spoke about still loving to be sent songs for a feature, hoping artists anticipate his verse when it comes back. The appearance comes as he wraps up his 20 Years of Carter Classics tour, whose schedule closed in Knoxville, Tennessee, on October 23.
The full In The Bayou episode runs 1 hour, 16 minutes and 3 seconds, and the “Forever” conversation starts at the 41:40 mark.
Further reading
Image: Alice Lin from Vancouver, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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