Kid Cudi is sharing the story of the time Jay-Z turned down the hook for what eventually became Kanye West’s “Welcome to Heartbreak.”
In a recent episode of his Big Bro with Kid Cudi podcast, Cudi discussed the journey of the song, then known as “Cooking Up in the Kitchen,” with guest Hit-Boy near the 14-minute mark in the video linked above.
“You know what's crazy about ‘Heartbreak’? Plain Pat had made that beat with Kanye and we had an idea for it that was for Jay,” Cudi said, before singing a part of the hook, “Cooking up in the kitchen/Young boy had that vision/Had to get with it.”
He added, “And it was the one joint that Hov didn't fuck with out of all the the pack that we gave him … So when we were working on 808s [& Heartbreak], Ye was like, ‘Yo, Hov didn't take this. We should change the hook up or whatever.’ And that's when I came up with the new hook.”
This isn’t the first time Cudi has talked about the track.
“We were like, 'Oh, it's for Jay, let's talk about that dope boy shit, let's make a theme for that dope boy in the kitchen," he said on a 2016 episode of Pharrell Williams and Scott Vener's Beats 1 Radio show OTHERtone, adding that the track came from The Blueprint 3‘s sessions.
