Akon and Ne-Yo have been on the road together as part of their Nights Like This tour, a collaboration Akon says has been a long time coming.
"Me and Ne-Yo go back 20 years," he tells ABC Audio. "We always wanted to do something together eventually ... but our careers always took us in two different directions."
This time, however, their schedules and goals aligned, allowing them to finally bring the idea to life. "It just so happened that we were in a cycle to both go out on our own tour. And we just had so much in common as to what we wanted to do, all the way down to the timeline," Akon says. "So it was like, yo, this could be the perfect time for us to come together and really do this big tour."
He adds that if they had gone on separate tours first, their schedules wouldn't have allowed for them to collaborate in this way, which is why they decided to put things in motion.
"This is our moment, you know what I mean? So we was like, let's do it, man, share the same stage, go back and forth with our hit records and just throw the biggest party everybody's ever seen for our culture around the time that we was coming up and doing music," Akon explains.
After performing in Europe and the U.K., the North American leg of the Nights Like This tour begins Wednesday in Vancouver. Asked what fans can expect from the show, which supports his latest album, Beautiful Day, Akon kept the details under wraps.
"You gotta ... buy the ticket and find out," he teases.
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