Ghost produced by Kanye West for D Dot Angelette.

Nas in an interview with Rolling Stone:

I was really just feeding and channeling the Temptations' “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” When I was a kid, I had a friend and his stepdad’s name was Papa. This friend is dead now, but he didn’t really like Papa that much because Papa was a dope fiend. When the Temptations song came on, he sang it a little extra. We were kids at this point and that stayed with me forever. My pop was not a dope fiend—my pop was my pop—so I talked about him. This was also one of Kanye’s first production. I didn’t even know him at the time. He just came through via someone else.

Samples The J.B.’s
The J.B.’s
(It’s Not the Express) It’s the J.B.’s Monaurail

Nas in Rollingstone:

The song was a EPMD sample and I just freestyled it. I was riding high off multi-platinum sales off I Am…, and just didn’t want to do anything but freestyle that single and put it out. We had a concept to make the video 3D, but we didn’t figure out how to get all the glasses to people and time was against us. Glasses were made, but obviously not enough for every household, so we fucked that one up a little bit. On that album, there’s a couple of songs that have a certain sound to it that doesn’t sound like anything else I’ve done. And it was a gray area in my life and that album represents that gray area. It was personal stuff that I’d rather not elaborate on. But I have nothing against that album.

I Am…, [released earlier that year], was originally supposed to be a double album, but the songs leaked and that killed it for me. I didn’t want to touch it. I hated that because no one’s supposed to hear a song before it’s time, so if that happens, I didn’t fuck with the record. It’s over. The record never existed. So I went and started brand new music. At the time, my brother Jungle was managing Noriega and Nature and he was getting a lot of beats from guys that were just blasting in the business, like Dame Grease and Swizz Beatz, and those beats was ahead of their time and I didn’t understand them that well. Then DMX and Nori really made them happen and I was able to go grab Dame Grease, [who produced four songs from Nastradamus] and be like, “Yo, work with me.” The Nostradamus thing was about the end of the world being the year 2000, so my record would be dropping right toward the end of the world.