Backyard by Travis Scott Song Info
On “Backyard,“ Travis raps about his come-up, new accomplishments, and his great experiences since becoming famous. This song drew controversy after Logic used an almost identical sample loop in his November 2015 song, “Stainless.” Both songs sample the same part of Marvin Gaye’s “Distant Lover.” Logic explained the backstory behind the similar samples in a November 2015 interview with Hot 97, confirming that he and Travis had spoken about it prior to its release. In an interview with DJ Booth—as part of their Beat Break series, he contextualized the song, saying: "That was another one of my favorite songs. I’m talking about the actual live version I sampled. What put me onto it was essentially Kanye, back when “Spaceships” came out. I was like, ‘what is that?!’ It was my favorite song for a long time, I found the sample and I fell in love with the song. Then I found that live version. As soon as I heard the intro I was in love—period. I chopped up the sample into a bunch of different chops. Starting from when Marvin starts to talk. I manually chop all of my samples on this playlist, so this was one of those. Initially, I had a big puzzle of chops and I just pieced this puzzle of sound together. And I heard what I wanted one day because it took me a while to conquer this sample. But this one day, I put the chops together how we hear it now and was instantly inspired to play keys around it. This beat came about pretty fast once I started making it with that direction. Next came the hi-hats and percussion, and drums shortly after. I feel we put more into the hi-hats than any of the other drums. Also, I had the beat with a bit more swing initially and it sounded more hip-hop. The beat sat in my library for a while until I sent it to my bro OZ and he added a different swing to it with changing the snare and the swing of the kicks but keeping the original vibe. He also added a melody in the beat that sticks out and from then, I knew it was perfected! I knew whoever got on this beat that it would bring something out of them because it had so much soul in the instrumental already. I sent it to 1da and he loved it as well! He sent it to Travis and the rest is history. It ended up being on just the Days Before Rodeo, which was cool, just the same: we didn’t get any bread for it, but we got so much respect for that record. I wouldn’t even trade that for the money that we would’ve got."
