DMX Comes Out of Retirement

Never-a-dull-moment rap star DMX has come out of his brief retirement to reunite with Sony Urban Music/Columbia Records — where his career began in 1992 — for his sixth studio album, Here We Go Again, due this summer.

The recently incarcerated rapper made the announcement at a Friday afternoon press conference held at Sony Studios in New York City. He was flanked by his Ruff Ryders motorcycle crew, producer Swizz Beatz (who is working on the album) and, of course, his signature entourage of pitbulls.

"It's an honor to be back at a record label that feels like home," DMX, holding a puppy pitbull, said of his new label before making sure to mention his feelings on his former home, Def Jam Records. "When I first went to Def Jam it was like a dream come true. It was a blessing because I was invited to a home. Then they sold the house on me and left me with people I didn't know that didn't give a fuck about me."

The thirty-four-year-old, platinum-selling rapper was released on December 30th from New York's Rikers Island jail complex, where he was serving a seventy-day sentence. Last October, X pleaded guilty to violating his parole for crashing his SUV through an airport security gate while under the influence of a controlled substance and posing as an undercover federal agent.

The press conference culminated in a flash of photographers with the poetic X rhyming a prayer, and saying, "There's always a conversation with the Lord on every album."

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Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

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