Photos: Earl Hayes, "Detroit’s Next ‘It’ MC"

An album half produced by Dr. Dre, half produced by Timbaland? It sounds too good to be true, but that’s what Detroit rapper Earl Hayes claims to have in the works. Mantrell Goodrum comes through with the above visuals, saying:

He is now working with Dr. Dre and Timbaland to complete his album. He has a couple of mixtapes out there: “24 Songs of Power” and “The 1st 48.” It’s not uncommon when hanging out with him socialize with celebs the likes of Thierry Guetta to Dr. Dre. Born and bred in the “D,” he is arguably Detroit’s next “it” MC… He is quietly making a come up in the Interscope camp. I photographed him in LA.

Here’s what Hayes had to say on the Mosley Music Group/Aftermath deal:

“I got dropped from Interscope. But I was still fucking with Dre. He told me not to worry about it, because he was gonna put together a situation for me. So me and Dre were at Jimmy Iovine’s Grammy party—like the last one he had—shooting craps. So Tim walked in like, ‘What are y’all doing.’ Dre tells him, ‘I’ma do an album on Hayes.’ And Tim tells him, ‘Nah, we gonna do an album on Hayes. That’s my dog.’ And they were both down, so we’ve just been like, ‘Let’s get it.’

“I was just chillin’ with Dre everyday and working with Tim. I never left out of the loop, and there was never no downtime. People want to associate those two events with different times, but we never stopped working together the whole time. I just tried to soak up whatever I could whenever I was around those dudes. They’re both real open as far as schooling me about the music and stuff.”

— Via HipHopDX