Lil Wayne's "Fix My Hat" Producer Talks Beastie Boys-Inspired Track

The producer of Lil Wayne's most recent Rebirth single "Fix My Hat" talked to Billboard recently about his contribution to Weezy's rap-rock follow-up to Tha Carter III. While previous Rebirth leaks like "Prom Queen" and "Hot Revolver" were drenched in guitars and Auto-Tune, producer Drew Money had other ideas when crafting "Fix My Hat." "I wanted to give him something old school-sounding, but with new elements in it like synths and 808s and snares," Drew Money told Billboard. "I wanted raw energy, and if you listen to Beastie Boys' first album, Licensed To Ill, you'll know what mind state I was in when creating it. I just wanted something simplistic but with a complex element in the hook."

In Rolling Stone's Spring Music Preview, we also noted the track's Beasties influence, describing the song as "an homage to vintage Beastie Boys." With some Weezy fans turned off by the nu-metal rock of "Prom Queen" but feeling the gritty feel of "Fix My Hat," Drew Money — who previously earned credits on Jay-Z's "Hello Brooklyn 2.0" and Chris Brown's "Down" — says the album will feature some rap songs "for his core fans that don't like rock." Whether Drew Money will contribute more than "Fix My Hat" to the album is unclear, but Money said he's currently working on the score for the Will Ferrell summer film Land of the Lost.

Dre of production duo Cool & Dre also said recently the album will feature of a mix of the two genres — and compared Wayne to Aquemini-era OutKast. "There's some rock records on there, but there's also some records where he's rapping. It's a Lil Wayne album. It's what you expect from Lil Wayne, where he's at creatively." The oft delayed Rebirth is scheduled to finally be released on June 23rd. "Wayne knows some people aren't gonna feel this," manager Cortez Bryant told Rolling Stone for our Spring Music Preview. "He don't care."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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