Denaun Porter Says André 3000 Was Almost on Revival, and the Album We Got Was Not the One They Made

Two and a half hours into a 3rd Verse interview, a superchat about a leak turned into the clearest account anyone has given of how Revival was assembled.

Someone in The 3rd Verse live chat asked Denaun Porter about a leaked Eminem acapella with his name in an ad lib. He said he had no idea what they meant. "We have a million songs. I don't know what that song is."

Then he kept talking, and the answer arrived anyway.

Denaun Porter: "You know what's funny? One of those songs that came out of that leak, André 3000 was supposed to be on one. That was the song that we sent to André 3000. And it almost happened on Relapse. No, not on Relapse. On Revival."

Later in the same stretch he goes back to it, unprompted: "It was a song that I did, and I was talking to André and I wanted to get him on a song, and it almost happened."

Set to start at 2:40:01. The André 3000 line comes twice, at 2:40:05 and again at 2:42:48.

Eminem and André 3000 have never shared a record in twenty-seven years of overlapping careers. That is the headline. The part underneath it is bigger.

The Revival they played back first

Denaun Porter: "The version of Revival that came out was not the version that we played at first. It was a lot shorter. Those songs weren't originally there. The one with Kehlani and the one with Alicia Keys, those were added later. The version that we played Jimmy and Rick was a lot shorter. And it was strictly about that."

"Jimmy and Rick" are Jimmy Iovine and Rick Rubin, who is credited across the finished album. "That" is the political core: police killings, race, and a sitting president.

Revival shipped on December 15, 2017 with nineteen tracks and a guest list that ran Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran, Pink, X Ambassadors, Alicia Keys and Kehlani. It is the most-criticised record in the catalogue, and the criticism has always been about shape rather than content: too long, too many pop hooks, too many features that sound like radio insurance.

Denaun's account says the shape was the last thing added.

Denaun Porter: "When people are able to go back to that album, the reason that album wasn't received well was because of the track listing. When the track listing came out, those songs weren't originally the one with Kehlani and the one with Alicia Keys."

Anyone who remembers December 2017 remembers that being true of the discourse. The tracklist leaked before the music and the verdict was in before a note played.

What the short version was about

The reason Denaun is telling this story at all is that he was on the other side of it. He describes Eminem sending him news stories through 2016 and 2017 and being angrier about them than he was.

Denaun Porter: "We black men speaking to this, we're so programmed. I didn't know how programmed I was, because M was extremely furious about what was going on. And I was like, people get shot every day, B. Like it was like that, because we so programmed. The Alton Sterling and all this thing, he was sending me things to the point where I wasn't even up on it, because I'm like, oh, this is happening all the time. I got handcuffed to a tree at 14 and beaten in my chest by cops for five, ten minutes. I'm used to that. I'm thinking this is normal."

He credits that stretch with changing how he heard his own work: "He reminded me of where it kind of made me go back to them times, and I was like, it's all or nothing."

Then the part he wanted on record.

Denaun Porter: "Kudos to him for having the balls to do that. He lost a lot of fans that was really about that Trump life. He didn't care. The fans was coming to the studio and asking questions and all kind of things, because he went at Trump. You do understand, you dissed the president. He drew a line in the sand and he didn't care. And anybody that makes a stand like that on a career, that's not an easy thing to do."

The public version of that stand was "The Storm," the BET Hip Hop Awards freestyle from October 10, 2017, two months before the album. The album version is "Untouchable," which is the closest thing on Revival to the record Denaun says they first played back.

"Untouchable," track 3 on Revival. Two halves, two perspectives, and the song most often named when people argue the album was misjudged.

What this does and does not tell us

It does not mean a finished André 3000 verse exists. Denaun's words are "we sent it" and "it almost happened," which is the same distance a thousand features die at. He has already said Eminem does not throw ideas away, so the beat is somewhere. A verse that was never recorded is not.

What it does establish is a sequence. A shorter, harder, explicitly political Revival existed, got played to the two men who could greenlight it, and then grew by several songs before release. Nobody has laid that out before, and the person laying it out executive produced the record.

Sources. Quotes are from "Producer Denaun Porter Joins The 3rd Verse Podcast, Full Interview," posted September 10, 2026. The André 3000 exchange sits at 2:40:01 to 2:43:00, with a second mention at 2:42:48. Revival was released December 15, 2017 on Shady, Aftermath and Interscope; Rick Rubin is credited as a producer across the album and Jimmy Iovine was then at Interscope. Denaun also names "Mark Batson and Emile" as the people called in for those sessions, without saying which finished songs came from them. "The Storm" aired on the BET Hip Hop Awards on October 10, 2017. Eminem and André 3000 have no shared credit on any commercially released record.