Lil Wayne Says He's "Too Old" To Write Down Lyrics
Lil Wayne's Method of creating lyrics has evolved over the years. While he once drew inspiration from JAY-Z to abandon the traditional pen and pad, he now has a different reason for his method.
In a recent appearance on FOX Sports’ UNDISPUTED, Weezy candidly confessed that he no longer writes down his verses because he feels he's "too old and too tired" to rely on a piece of paper in the recording booth.
"Thank God for the iPhone. Before, I would have to remind myself all day because I don’t write nothing down. They always be thinking that it’s some type of achievement,” the 41-year-old shared with co-hosts Michael Irvin and Skip Bayless.
"No, I don’t write because I’m too old and too tired to be trying to read. You know, they got the iPhone now so I go ahead and record the voice memo.”
This isn't the first time Lil Wayne has cited a reason for his paperless approach to writing lyrics. Speaking on The Pivot Podcast earlier in the year, he attributed JAY-Z with influencing him to ditch his notebook early in his career after learning that Jigga crafted his rhymes off the top of his head without jotting down any lyrics.
“Like Biggie, love Biggie, love Jadakiss — I love all that shit, but Jay. The moment I heard it I stopped. You could ask my boy. ‘I heard that n-gga JAY-Z don’t write no more,'” he recalled. “We went in the studio and we did ‘10,000 Bars’ and that was the last time I rapped anything off of a paper.”
The track "10,000 Bars" Wayne referred to is a 35-minute opus from 2002 where he delivered a rapid-fire barrage of rhymes over various beats, marking the last time he rapped from a written page. The discarded pages even littered the studio floor.
Wayne also recently recounted a moment when Birdman reprimanded him for allegedly trying to emulate JAY-Z's style while rapping.