Songfacts®:

• Rick Ross' "Maybach Music" featuring Jay-Z was a track from Ross's second album, Trilla. He then recruited Lil Wayne and Kanye West to join him on its sequel "Maybach Music 2." To complete the trilogy, Ross enlisted three more heavyweights, T.I., Jadakiss and Erykah Badu for this track. The neo-soul queen and the Miami MC previously worked together on a remix of Badu's "Window Seat."
• Ross paid tribute to T. I.'s contribution in an interview with MTV's Sucker Free: "I had to do it real big with someone I never collaborated with before: Tip," Ross said. "We got a full orchestra, a live orchestra from the strings on down. It's gonna be a masterpiece. It felt good to work with him. He just came home and got in the lab. He heard the music, he knows the legacy of part one and part two. And I feel like the verse he spits on this record may be one of his hardest verses. It's that 'Rubber Band Man' flow."
• Erykah Badu also directed the song's music video.
• Ross explained that his collaboration with Erykah Badu led to her appearing on this song: "Her music always attracted me; it was always attractive to my kind of music," he said. "Once we collaborated with the 'Window Seat' remix... the lanes of communication was open, I was like, 'Let's do something different.'"
• Ross said of T.I.'s contribution: "I felt the time was right for me and T.I. [to work together]," he explained. "We had never personally collaborated with each other on a record one on one. Early on in my career, I had said [negative] things when I didn't know him. Just us being bosses and us being leaders and us being examples, we bossed up. We both did. He came from home doing what he did. I did my thing."
  But gradually the animosity waned, and Ross asked Tip to collaborate. "Just on a mutual respect for each other, I reached out to him. When I got that verse back, I was like, 'He meant that.' We had been seeing each other over a period of time, saluting each other, bumping into each other, he knew I was a fan of his. We captured that moment in time which was one of the dopest records. And that meant the most to me. I used to play that T.I. verse in my studio, like, 'This set the tone, right here. It set the tone.' It just felt good for the homie to lace me. I salute Tip." (Source: MTV News)