Lil Wayne could not stop rapping even when he was in jail.
Appearing on the Friends Keep Secrets podcast, Wayne shared how he recorded music while serving eight months in prison at Rikers Island in 2010.
“I went to the studio every night in jail,” Wayne, now 43, said. He noted that he recorded over the phone.
“In my cell,” he added. “That meant everybody be quiet. I’m about to beat on this damn table.”
Although he had a 10:45 p.m. bedtime, he found a clever workaround: starting phone calls right before cutoff so he could keep recording.
“I would do it on purpose … That’s why everyone’s gotta lock in,” he recalled. “It was just me on the phone and [that way] I can actually record.”
Lil Wayne also said that his time in prison wasn’t all that bad because of his celebrity status.
“Not at all,” he said. “But I have to give all of that thanks and credit to the people that were around me in there. They made it their job to make it easy for me.”
To make his days “shorter,” he started watching TV with the general population. His favorite show was Discovery Channel’s Naked and Afraid.
“You think they’re watching it because a female is in there naked. Nah, they know the storyline, they know everything,” he said.
Back in February 2010, Lil Wayne spoke to Rolling Stone about his past legal issues.
“I look at things as ‘Everything is meant to be.’ And I know it’s an experience that I need to have if God’s putting me through it,” he said. “So I don’t look at it as wrong; I just … I damn sure don’t look at it as right, that’s all.”
One of Lil Wayne’s visitors was Fat Joe, who remembered how he felt seeing him locked up.
One of the saddest things I ever did was go visit Lil Wayne in jail. Not only that, but they had him chained up. Lil Wayne,” Fat Joe said on Red Table Talk. “They had him in shackles and all that. They had him like he was the killer.”