There’s a story behind every song. Whether the track was conceived via email exchange, crafted in-studio or pieced together using unreleased material, there’s always a story—the only variable is who tells it. Today, on MASS APPEAL’s Off The Record, that “who” is DJ Premier.

The legendary beatsmith and disc jockey has been behind some of music’s most pivotal moments and movements, from producing on Nas’s ‘Illmatic’ to commandeering Christina Aguilera’s ‘Back to Basics’ album more than a decade later, and the many worlds of hypnotic scratches and snares that fall in between. But Preemo will never forget the night he got a call from D’Angelo as he left a studio session with Canibus—that call led to the session that produced “Devil’s Pie.”

“I was leaving [the studio] and my phone just happened to ring,” Preemo recalls. “Just, on the humble, it was D. He was like ‘Yo, what you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m just leaving the studio with Canibus. We were working on something but the track didn’t work out.’ He goes, ‘Can I hear it?’ I said, ‘Yeah. It’s just a bass line, though, not a lot of stuff happening.’ I went over there, played it, and he just starts going, ‘Yo! I want this.’”

To boot, when Premier showed up, he was surrounded by J Dilla, Alchemist and ?uestlove. In hindsight, there’s no way that session could’ve resulted in something any less than spectacular.