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Lil Wayne found a way to keep making music, even while serving time behind bars at New York City’s Rikers Island in 2010.
The rapper revealed on the “Friends Keep Secrets” podcast that he turned his jail cell into a makeshift recording studio, refusing to let incarceration interrupt his creativity.
Wayne recalled that he treated every night in jail like a studio session, using nothing more than a prison phone and a table. He said, “I went to the studio every night in jail… That meant everybody be quiet. I’m about to beat on this d*mn table.”
He continued, “I would do it on purpose … That’s why everyone’s gotta lock in. It was just me on the phone and [that way] I can actually record.”
Wayne, born Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., served eight months after pleading guilty to attempted criminal possession of a weapon stemming from a 2007 arrest, when police found a loaded handgun on his tour bus following a concert in New York City.
His work from behind bars appeared on his 2010 album, I Am Not a Human Being, which was released while he was still confined. The album itself was assembled and released by his label.
When asked whether other inmates tried to listen in while he worked, Wayne said most people simply were not interested in what he was doing on the jail telephone.
That indifference, he pointed, gave him the space he needed to keep building songs during a sentence that otherwise cut him off from his usual studio routine.
Wayne also shared that prison wasn’t the worst year of his life, mainly because of the people he was surrounded by.
“I have to give all of that thanks and credit to the people that were around me in there,” he said. “They made it their job to make it easy for me.
When he wasn’t making music, Wayne initially kept to himself to help the days pass. Eventually, though, he started watching television with other inmates. His show of choice was Discovery Channel’s N*ked and Afraid and he pushed back on the assumption that its appeal came from nudity.
“You think they’re watching it because a female is in there n*ked,” he said. “Nah, they know the storyline, they know everything.”
He was released from Rikers Island in November 2010.
In a February 2010 interview with Rolling Stone, given before reporting to jail, Wayne addressed the looming sentence with the same sense of acceptance he reflected on during the podcast years later.
“I look at things as ‘Everything is meant to be,'” he said at the time. “I know it’s an experience that I need to have if God’s putting me through it. So I don’t look at it as wrong, I just, I damn sure don’t look at it as right, that’s all.”
Since leaving prison, Wayne has continued releasing music, including his 2025 album Tha Carter VI. He has also said in recent interviews that he’s already working on new material.
