Jay talks about the last time he wrote lyrics down.
Posted by Media Outrage on November 26th, 2007
Jay talked about the last time he actually wrote lyrics down on paper and how he has inspired others to use his process of not using a pen…
“I’ve inspired a generation of bad writers,” Jay jokingly said.
Jay says the last time he wrote lyrics down on paper was for his ’96 debut “Reasonable Doubt” the song ‘Can I Live’.
“What happened was, I was doing that song with someone else, and they heard the first verse and they was like, ‘Man, you take that song. Finish it, ’cause it sounds like you got a lot more to say,’ …you know, that type of thing. So I just wanted to get it down quick, I didn’t want to keep going over it. It was like [the album] mastering time, so I just sat down in the booth and wrote that [verse].”
He wanted to write lyrics down for the Black Album….
“It just felt better [the way I do it now],” Jay said. “In my mind, I wanted to sit down and write and do this thing a certain way. But your natural process is your process. It’s difficult to go back to what you were doing when you were 15 or 16, but my process is different [now]. It sounds great on paper, ‘I’m gonna sit down and write this entire album like I did before.’ But once you get back in the studio and you been doing this process for years and years, it just felt natural to do it the way I been doing it. No paper, no pen, just listen to the music and do it.”
