Lil Wayne's guitar phase was a particularly forgettable moment in the past decade of pop culture, but it seemed to affect the way he now approaches new music.
In a recent interview with XXL, he talked about how Prince inspired him around the time when he was making The Carter II.
"It was the way he pronounced words and the way he used his voice," Wayne said. "It was like if he was playing with a baby. You know if he was playing with a kid. [Imitates a baby cooing] It was the way that he was exploring it.
"He wasn't doing it because it was funny. He was doing it because he could make it sound good and exceptional. I realized that I could do that too. He wasn't afraid of how he sounded because he knew what he was saying and how he was saying it would always sound good."
After the release of "Leather So Soft" off 2006's Like Father, Like Son (a collab with Baby), Wayne decided he was going to dive headfirst into rock.
"I'd never played it before, but one day I just picked that b---- up because of the "Leather So Soft" video," he said. "We shot that video and because the song had a real prominent riff, they wanted to shoot me with a guitar.
"So you know me, the guy I am, after the video shoot, we went on tour and I didn't want to be the guy that does the fake squealing guitar. I'm not that dude. I'm not the one just to be faking it. So I went out and got someone to teach me the actual riff and kept going from there. We had a tour, and that was a big song, and I was like, "Damn, I need to learn to play this in front of a bunch of muthaf----s."
With The Carter V nearing its Oct. 28 release date, Wayne didn't talk much about the details, but he made sure to lather praise on protégés Drake and Nicki Minaj.
"Call me old-fashioned and country, but with Drake, that was the first time I'd seen someone that knew how to sing and rap," Wayne said. "That's all it was. I didn't know nobody who knew how to do that. You had those old school singing n----s, where people would do a little eight-bar verse on their songs. But [Drake] was spitting and singing and killing that too."
As for Nicki:
"I wanted a female," he said. "Every team needs a female to rep your gang. She was annihilating n----s. I mean males. I was like, "I have to beef my shit up on that muthaf---a." She just knocked it out the park from day one. She's just Nicki. I don't know whose idea it was, but it was a good idea."
