Kanye West opened up about the loss of his mother and how it impacted his work in a new interview on David Letterman‘s Netflix talk show.
West will be a guest on an upcoming episode of Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. The talk show series has seen interviews with former President Barack Obama, TV icon Tina Fey and rapper Jay-Z. In Season 2, West will join that list, and in a new teaser released by Netflix, he gets serious about how his mother’s absence weighs on him.
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“This would have been the funnest time of her life, to have those kids running around that house and being able to go and buy them toys,” West said of his children.
His mother, Donda, passed away in 2007, and the impact on West’s life was serious. He and Donda were very close, and fans have long theorized that her passing had a ripple effect on all of West’s most influential work since then.
“I remember my mother bought me a bear that was multicolored, and I was very into [Japanese contemporary artist] Takashi Murakami at that time on that third album, Graduation,” he recalled. “She said it kind of, you know, feels like Takashi Murakami. And then I was sort of like, ‘I don’t want that, that ain’t no Takashi Murakami bear, and stuff like that.”
“And then she passed a few weeks after, and I did everything I could to find that bear and place that bear on top of all the Takashi Murakami stuff I had in the house,” he finished.
West said that he still feels his mother’s presence in his life and believes that she is a guiding force for him and his family even after her death.
“But she’s here, with us, and she’s guiding us,” he said. West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, can be seen smiling at him from the audience.
Donda’s death was related to complications from a cosmetic surgery procedure. She was 58 years old at the time, and she missed the birth of her first grandchild by about six years. West and Kardashian welcomed their fourth child, Psalm, into their family earlier this month. Like his sister Chicago, Psalm was born through a surrogacy, while their first two children, North and Saint, were carried by Kardashian herself.
On My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, Letterman sits down with influential guests for an on-stage interview lasting almost an hour. The topics usually cover the breadth of their work as well as the truth that the public might not see as often, and it will undoubtedly be an interesting venue for West to acknowledge some of the more controversial aspects of his public life in recent years.
Season 2 of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction hits Netflix on May 31.
