-Thank you for coming back.
And, man, oh, man,
congrats on the record.
-Thank you.
-Come on, this is fantastic.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-A great record.
And, man, so what is the thing
that went down with this?
'Cause we waited four years
for the album to come out.
And there was some legal thing
with your label or something?
-Yeah, it was,
you know, business.
[ Laughter ]
-Yeah.
-Yeah, you know.
-Yeah, I guess so, yeah.
-Kind of over -- yeah.
Kind of over my head at times.
And I'm a real musician.
I'm an artist, so...
-Absolutely.
Well, it must be --
Is it frustrating
'cause you couldn't
get away from your label,
or is it too --
you can't even talk about it?
-It's business.
[ Laughter ]
-Legal stuff.
-But when I say I'm an artist,
meaning, I'm so into
what I'm doing every day,
into my craft,
that when I have to go too far
into something else,
I put somebody else
in charge of it.
When there's somebody else
that was in charge of it
messes up,
then everything blows up.
And that's how everything
blew up.
We just need
the debris to clear.
-Just clear it and then go back
to exactly just you getting out.
But how do you fill the time?
Four years?
What were you --
-Working, working.
-Yeah, I know, yeah.
-Just working.
Just in the studio every day.
I like to skate, working,
skating, things like that.
I am a father of four.
-Oh, really?
-Yeah, that's the main thing.
-That's a lot of stuff.
Absolutely, yeah.
Do the kids, do they skate?
-The boys skate, yeah.
My daughter does not skate.
-No. Well, how'd you
get into skateboarding?
Did you grow up
skateboarding in New Orleans?
-Skateboarding in New Orleans,
no.
[ Laughter ]
-That didn't happen, right?
-No, you bring a skateboard
through my neighborhood,
I told them earlier, that's
when the UFO just hit the block.
-Thinking aliens.
-Exactly.
-Well, how'd you get
into skating?
-Having too much time to myself.
Sitting down,
watching TV every day,
I ran into this channel
I started watching every day,
and this kid
was on there skating.
And I started watching exactly
how much fun he was having,
how his mind was not thinking
about nothing else.
The world could have blown up
to the left of him.
This is the right of me.
To the left of him, but...
[ Laughter ]
And he was just
so focused on it.
I don't know if I my turned
my left shoulder proper enough.
I'm not sure if my left foot --
I was like, "I need to be
that focused on something else
other than what I'm focused on."
That's how I got into it.
-Wow! So you clear your mind
by skateboarding?
-Yeah.
You better.
-Yeah.
-If you're thinking
about something else
while you on that board,
it's gonna show you.
[ Laughter ]
-It will.
Is it true?
Someone said that you've written
probably over a million songs
or almost a million songs.
That's impossible, isn't it?
-That's not true,
because I don't write.
[ Laughter ]
-You don't --
You don't write?
-I just go in there what I was
feeling that day is how it goes.
-Really?
-Yeah.
-And what, do you
just think of the beats,
or you think of the song,
and then you just go?
-It's always
a different trigger,
meaning sometimes
it might be somebody else's song
or maybe a feature --
they already had that sub--
they already had that subject,
so I just stick to the subject.
If it's mine, if the music is
what it is, I go off the music.
If not, if I had a subject
already on my mind,
something that was bothering me
or some verse
that been rhyming too long
and I didn't see a mic yet,
there it is.
-But how do you remember
the song when you perform it?
-Your guys are so, so, so kind
and so generous.
They typed up my lyrics for me.
And so I'm back there
studying them right now.
[ Laughter, cheers, applause ]
-Wow.
Do we have a pic?
Yeah, we do.
We have a picture of you
at rehearsal.
This is real. This is you
reading your own lyrics,
getting ready for tonight.
That's fascinating.
I never heard
of anyone doing it that way.
-Yeah, what happens is,
because I don't write,
what makes it so difficult is
because I don't write it down.
If you write it down, you get
stuck to what's on the paper,
and you'll remember it
every time just like school,
just like a test.
But because you don't --
because I don't write it down,
and I just go right there
from there,
I move on to the next song,
which means I move on
to the next thought.
I forgot whatever
the last song was about.
Yeah.
-You just clear it out.
You don't even want to --
-I can't.
-You can't?
-Yeah, I've got to think
about the next song and put my
full 39 million percent into it.
-Wow.
How fun is that, man?
And then, you just skate
to just clear it all out?
[ Laughter ]
That's just fantastic.
-I do something else to clear it
all out, but you know.
-Oh, you do
a little something else?
Yeah, okay.
[ Laughter, cheers, applause ]
You can't smell it on TV,
but when you're here,
I'm getting a little secondhand.
I got to say congrats.
You got Kendrick Lamar on here,
Travis Scott, Nicki Minaj,
Snoop Dogg.
And this is gonna be your
fourth number-one album.
-I do not know that, but yeah.
-Congrats.
I'm telling you.
Congratulations,
and we love you.
Thank you
for being here tonight.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Thanks to Lil Wayne
and "The Carter V."
