T.I. Announces Impending Return From Prison With Single "I'm Back"

Even though T.I. is finishing up his prison sentence in an Atlanta halfway house, the rapper loudly announced his own comeback with a new single titled "I'm Back" today. Listen to the track over at Tip's own Trap Muzik Website, where you can also purchase a high quality or low quality download of the song. According to Nah Right, "I'm Back" is just the opening salvo of T.I.'s return, with the rapper's follow-up to 2008's Paper Trail due out in August.

A day in the life of T.I.: photos of the MC's days before prison.

While T.I.'s pre-prison Paper Trail singles were more reflective and concerned with the hardship he was about to endure — see "Dead and Gone" with Justin Timberlake and "Remember Me" with Mary J. Blige — "I'm Back" finds T.I. recapturing his King flow over an icy Southern beat by Grand Hustle producers TrackSlayerz. "The track is hard. It brings you back to the old T.I.," the producers recently told Vibe. "He's coming back with the aggressive, mean kind of swag. It's definitely a [street single]. He's kinda addressing that he's been on a little hiatus with the jail sentence and don't worry about that [because] he hasn't fallen off." Throughout the chorus, T.I. tells listeners to "recognize I'm back," and this comeback single makes it all but impossible to ignore Tip's return.

As Rolling Stone previously reported, after being released from an Arkansas penitentiary more than halfway through his year-and-a-day-long prison sentence stemming from weapons charges, T.I. is currently in an ATL halfway house, where the rapper will remain until his sentence expires on March 26th. The rapper has reportedly been hard at work making up for lost recording time since his release, and Tip revealed during an "I'm Back" conference call that his next album will be released late this summer.

Related Stories:
• T.I. Moves From Prison to Halfway House for Remainder of Sentence
• T.I. Sentenced To One Year and a Day In Prison, Could Serve Less
• Guns, Feds and Kids: T.I. Returns

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Song Stories

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell | 1974

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.

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