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 shit. 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.