Lil Wayne’s May Rolling Stone cover story was an arduous process, with cross-country trips, missed interview sessions, and indeterminate waiting. But when Lil Wayne did talk to us, the conversation was plentiful, ranging from his guitar playing to what he wants his legacy to be as an MC. Below are some of the gems that didn’t make the piece.
Soul icon Betty Wright taught him how to play guitar
It was during the video for his 2006 Birdman-tandem album Like Father, Like Son’s “Leather So Soft” where Wayne first learned to play the guitar. While writing the video’s treatment, he concluded that if he was putting a guitar in the video, he needed to know what to do with it. The late singer Betty Wright, who collaborated with him on Tha carter III’s “Playing With Fire,” showed Wayne how to play on set. “She said, ‘Look at your fingers. Baby, I know what I’m talking about. You’re a guitar player. You won’t ever need nothing but those two fingers,’” he recalls, his fingers contorted in a guitar grasp. Since then, his guitar craft has been a continuous build on that initial two-finger riff from “Leather So Soft.”
He has a colorful take on rapper Papoose’s dating preferences
As a workaholic, Wayne misses a lot. Our conversations with Lil Wayne involved giving him multiple crash courses on people, places, and things in pop culture. At one juncture in Atlanta, he randomly asked if rappers Papoose and Remy Ma were still together, oblivious to their recent messy breakup. Lil Twist and I give him a Shaderoom-style update and tell him that Papoose is now dating boxer Claressa Shields. Wayne dryly quips, “She like somebody that could beat his ass.”
He loves to record in scenic spots
In Atlanta, Wayne revealed that he rarely goes on do-nothing vacations, preferring to bring his recording equipment with him everywhere he goes. He told me Aspen, Colorado, is one of his favorite spots to make music. “I really like it when I got the mountain scenery with the snow and shit like that, because a nigga from the South [like me] never seen none of that shit,” he says, his outstretched hands mimicking the mountainous sprawl while he faces the recording booth.
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He knows what he wants his legacy to be
When we asked Wayne what he wanted his legacy to be, he was unequivocal: “I’ve always had the same goal since the day I said it: Best rapper. Plain and simple,” he says. “When we talk about Michael Jordan, it’s just hands-down [that he’s considered the best]. Of course LeBron [James] came up and had some people asking questions about that, but naturally, Jordan’s the best ever. I want that type of thing. That’s the legacy I want to leave when they say, ‘Weezy? Oh, shit, that’s the best rapper, that nigga don’t even count. If you do a list, that nigga don’t count.’”
Wayne is strictly business when it comes to performances
After seeing Wayne go from Sprinter van to stage in just a couple of minutes at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena, not even touching his dressing room, we had to ask him if he had a preshow routine. “Whatever the routine is, that’s taking place inside the Sprinter,” he says. “I don’t do the backstage or none of the shit like that, unless it’s a tour. If it’s a spot show, nah, man. That’s a business trip. We came to fulfill our responsibilities and duties. That’s how [bad] shit happens, when you stick around and hang around and all that type of shit.” His manager Fabian Marasciullo added that their routine is usually “plane to stage to plane.”
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Wayne is in awe of his own creativity
When we asked Wayne about the pros and cons of aging, he credited “experience” as the thing he most appreciates at 42. He also marveled at the way he can still come up with fresh lines 30 years into the game. “The craziest part of it is knowing that I’ve done all this shit, and there’s still things to say,” he says, joking, “It’s going to have to come to a point where I can’t rap anymore because I done rapped all the words. Still to this day, it’s scientifically weird to me that you still … the words are amazing.”
Tyler, the Creator has a specific way of asking for features
In 2024, Wayne’s appearance on Tyler, the Creator’s “Sticky” — which also features GloRilla and Sexyy Red — extended his streak of consecutive years with a Billboard Hot 100 appearance to 21. “Tyler just sent that,” Wayne recalls of the track, noting that the Chromokopia artist’s feature requests “always come with instructions. Tyler, you crazy as fuck.” He adds that Tyler told him to do a verse, but Wayne should understand that he might split it up.
