On Thursday (Feb. 27), Royce Da 5’9″ dropped by Billboard‘s offices to perform some tracks from his eighth studio album, The Allegory, which dropped last week — and he flexed that rapping isn’t his only skill.
Royce linked up with fellow Detroit-bred rapper Eminem on his Billboard 200-topping album Music to Be Murdered By not only by contributing bars on “You Gon’ Learn,” “Yah Yah” and “I Will,” but also by scoring two producer credits, including on the album’s lead single, “Darkness.”
“I’d love to get to a point where I’m producing entire projects for people because I have a dream that one day I can produce entire projects without having to write all the raps,” he said in the interview.
Aside from his dreams of making beats for other artists, his dexterity forms his own art. The seasoned rapper was still learning how to make beats while recording The Allegory, and “I Don’t Age” bridged his musical talents for the first time in his career. “The very first track that I made, the first beat that I made that I felt was worthy of me writing to that I was actually able to write something to and record a song to, was ‘I Don’t Age,'” Royce Da 5’9″ disclosed. “That was the icebreaker, and then everything sort of came together after that.”
Watch the interview along with his performance below.