We conclude our G-Unit interview series with the silent, but always focused Lloyd Banks, who plans to flood the market this year with brand new music.
Distancing himself from not only 50 Cent, but also the industry prior to the G-Unit reunion at this past Summer Jam festival, Banks made it clear that he never lost his passion for making music. In fact, while breaking down his entire writing process, the PLK revealed that he’s got about 150-200 songs written his phone right now, unrecorded. We learned the many techniques Banks uses in his writing process, giving us the inside scoop on how he crafts the metaphors and punchlines he’s been known for.
To the anxious Lloyd Banks fans who have been waiting for new music, don’t sweat it, Banks also revealed that he plans to drop more than two solo projects this year, the first of which being
Cold Corner 3 expected to be released “very, very soon.” Reminiscing on his 5-mixtape
5 Or Nothing series that he released in the year of 2010, Banks plans to follow suit in 2015.
For the remainder of our conversation, Banks talks about how the Unit internally decides which songs they’re going to release and when they’re going to release it; how Banks reacted to Eminem telling him that he was one of the greatest ever; and how it feels to finally be reunited with the Unit.
Click the following pages to read our full sit down with Lloyd Banks and click here to see our interviews with Young Buck,
Kidd Kidd and
Tony Yayo.
Most of us thought the Unit would never break up in the first place, then thought you guys would never get back together, but now it’s a reality. How does it feel?
Lloyd Banks: You said it right, man. I never imagined all of the achievements and how far we would actually go. It was a point where I was just happy to be a part of the group. When you come from where I come from, you don’t have much, so what we do have, we share amongst each other, whether it was the club or food or whatever it was. Before we even started to really make it, 50 pulled me aside and told me what he thought I could do as a solo artist, so we were kind of all put out there early and groomed a lot faster than your average artist. But I feel blessed to be able to come back in the nick of time for real. I’m only three albums in, I don’t feel like I’m eight albums in or something.
After the first wave of interviews, you personally said you took time away from music because it was boring and uninspiring. Has that changed at all?
Lloyd Banks: I always recorded, so I never got to that point where I wasn’t inspired enough to actually make music. But as far as the presentation and the time slot, I’ve gotten the opportunity to be a little more picky. I never really had that luxury of watching the game and seeing how it moves and picking my spot. I was kinda in a situation where if you’re sitting on a major and you’re on a schedule, you kinda gotta strike or you don’t know when you’re gonna get a chance to strike again. I didn’t want to be running in place with the rest of the industry. At the end of the day, I love competition, man. It’s not fun to be out there and feel like there’s nobody really interested in the culture the way that you are.
In the past we’ve heard the likes of Kanye and even Eminem say that you’re one of the best rappers of all time. How does that feel?
Lloyd Banks: Man, that fukked me up. Definitely when [Eminem] said it. I’ve had the opportunity to play all of my albums for Em and he’s been involved with production on all of my albums or participated. I would always fly out to Detroit and go to the Piston games and kick it and just talk about music for hours. Last time I went out there to play him
Hunger For More 2, that’s when he told me I’m one of the greatest ever and it’s just little things like that just lights another fire.
The thing you guys have been preaching the most is your independence from the major label. Internally speaking, how do you guys determine what songs get picked and when things get released?
Lloyd Banks: It’s mainly a collective thing and us just bouncing ideas off of each other. Like Buck’ll tell you himself — I urged him to drop the
Before The Beast project because he just had so many records at that time and it only made sense with the type of music we were dropping. It’s funny you say that, because we were just talking the other day about how we all kind of come up with dates in our own mind so nobody’s stepping on anyone’s toes and then we work around the dates. But as far as me critiquing myself, it’s never been nobody else’s call or a reason why I didn’t put out music other then me being my own biggest critic.
What’s the status of Cold Corner 3?
Lloyd Banks: Apologies to everyone who’s been waiting on it, but there’s a lot of things that go into this. Remember when Trinidad James was first coming up, and he said the things he said about New York adopting the South’s flow? At the time when he said that, I had a project done for DJ Drama, the
All Or Nothing: Failure’s No Option project, which was my rendition of the trap beats. I was using those trap-sounding beats and I was doing my thing over it and it was dope. And with the
Cold Corner, a lot of things happened behind the scenes that people don’t know about. I lost several records to other projects or sampling issues and I’ve had issues with production where they can’t find the data and all types of shyt. So right now it’s kind of the clean up time, and once I got news on the EP and when that was gonna be released, it made sense to put all my energy and focus into that. They can definitely expect the
Cold Corner 3 very, very soon.
You think you’ll release a solo album this year?
Lloyd Banks: That’s definitely my goal to release more than two projects, maybe three or four. In 2010, I was coming off the momentum of five mixtapes, the
5 Or Nothing Series and that’s actually where the first
Cold Corner ended up. So from January to December I was just firing off music. Then when I dropped “Beamer Benz Or Bentley” people thought I came out of nowhere, but that wasn’t the case. I wanna get back to that though, flooding the market.
You have a unique way of putting your metaphors together and you’re obviously the self-proclaimed punchline King. I’m curious, what’s your writing process like?
Lloyd Banks: Man, that’s like one of the best questions I’ve ever gotten. Um, in my phone right now, I probably have, no exaggeration, 150 records written that’s not recorded. I just write every single day with or without a beat. If I don’t write for a beat, it usually ends up for freestyle purposes. If you go back to date right, most of the G-Unit records were over Havoc’s production and his beats were usually a mid-tempo or a slow-tempo. So as I would write, in my head I’d go “dot, dot, dot, dot, dot” to sound out the flow when I wouldn’t be writing to a certain beat. Then most of the songs that are in rotation on the radio follow that same tempo, so I would be good for radio freestyles too. Then if I go down south you know, it’s the choppy stuff so I just write to these different tempos in my head and end up writing most of my stuff without the beat.
I’m a verse-driven artist, so I usually write the verses first and then the chorus. I got composition books still of my raps when I was like 11 or 12, so I’m like one of those freaks or hoarders when it comes to that kind of stuff. I got everything,
XXLs,
The Source Magazine, and
VIBEs and every other publication that was out at that time. I read a lot of the magazines so I would flip through them and see all the ads that were in there, which was basically every page back then, and so I’d rip out the page and that’s how I slowly built up my metaphors. I was like, “Oh ok, Mercedes Benz. 22 inch rims. Giovanni’s. Ok.” keep that in mind, flip to the next page, and combine it with what’s on that one. I do that to this day. I also write the alphabet at the top of each page when I’m writing and that definitely helps. There’s a lot of little tricks I use.
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coming soon
