Songfacts®:

• On this Blueprint 3 closing track, Jay-Z puts his career in perspective.
• The song features English R&B/electronica artist Mr Hudson, who is a protégé of the track's producer, Kanye West. Mr. Hudson is one a number of newcomers, which also include Drake, Kid Cudi and J. Cole on the album. In an interview with the Associated Press, the Brooklyn MC was asked what he learnt from them. He replied: "Their excitement for the game. You know when you first come in the music business... you come with really wide eyes. That's why on every single album I have a new producer or new rapper because I love that new energy. Whatever they do from there is on them, but that new energy and what they had right there is raw and untapped, and pretty much cool."
• This samples Alphaville's 1984 synth-pop standard "Forever Young."
• Digital Spy asked Mr. Hudson what it was like working on this song. He replied: "That was a quick thing. It's funny because sometimes big tracks come really easily. I'm not exaggerating, but we did it in an hour. Kanye spent about half an hour on the beats, I spent half an hour on the vocal and then we were like, 'Cool, let's send it to Jigga'. And he loved it, so it was almost too easy. If only that could happen every day!"
• Mr. Hudson recalled to Pyro Radio: "I heard the track when me and Kanye was working on the beat, but I had never heard his bars until it leaked, I was in New York, everyone was playing it, talking about it, it was the last track on the album, people were hitting me up and that was a massive buzz."
• Jay-Z has mixed feelings about this song because the final version didn't turn out quite how he wanted it to.
  
  "Sometimes it happens immediately, sometimes songs happen in three minutes, and then songs (like) 'Forever Young' took me about a month to finish," he revealed to David Letterman in a 2018 interview. "It's like, 'Man, I can never finish this song,' and it never turned out the way I wanted it, and it went on to be a really successful song for me, but it still bothers me that I didn't finish it the way I wanted to."