Lil Wayne to Record on the Jet Ride Home From Prison

When Lil Wayne leaves jail on Thursday, he's expected to begin recording even before he gets home — his team is looking for a plane with studio equipment so he can start cutting tracks while he's on his way home.

"We're gonna deal with that microphone, no trip," Bryan Williams (a.k.a. Birdman), co-founder of Lil Wayne's Cash Money label, says in the new Rolling Stone. "You can't keep him out of the studio."

Birdman said that Wayne's been writing lyrics furiously during his eight-month sentence at New York's Rikers Island. "He hasn't written out rhymes since [his early group] the Hot Boys," Birdman says. "There's a different swagger coming from Wayne, different things to talk about." The MC has had plenty of time to reflect, since he was placed in solitary confinement earlier this month after being caught for a second time with music-related contraband.

Lil Wayne: A History in Photos

The lyrics are intended for Wayne's next LP, Tha Carter IV, which is planned for early next year. (Wayne latest album, I Am Not a Human Being , topped the Billboard albums chart a couple of weeks back.) Manager Cortez Bryant told Rolling Stone that Wayne's next LP will reflect the MC's time in prison. "He's had time to take everyting in from the years leading p to his going in," Bryant says. "We've been at such a fast pace, moving, moving, moving, that he's finally been able to put some things in perspective."

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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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