Ryan Leslie, in an effort to get passed his recent scandals, is prepping a new album Black Mozart. The producer stopped by The Breakfast Club on Power 105 this morning to discuss the upcoming album as well as his lawsuit over his laptop, Cassie and more.
The rapper/producer explained the album title, detailing his love for piano. He also revealed he recorded the album in Austria, which also influenced his title choice.
"I think that if you really wanna be the best at what you do, you gotta set the bar super high. And 'Black Mozart' is really based on where I recorded it too. I went to Vienna, Austria, where all the classical greats are from. My mom is a classical piano player, so I grew up just listening her play all the time." Ryan added,"I really love the piano, and I love composition, I love making music."
Ryan revealed that he wrote Black Mozart following the verdict of his recent lawsuit."Immediately following that verdict I went to the studio and I wrote the whole album in like two days, but I didn't want to record it here. I just flew my whole team to Austria," he said.
The producer has seen his fair share of the spotlight recently, having been plastered on the front page of the NY Post when the story broke that he refused to pay the $1 million reward he had offered for the return of his laptop. Ryan's laptop had been stolen in Europe, and a German man had finally recovered it, however, it was missing the music which was the reason why Ryan had offered such a large sum. As he explained, "I wouldn't be able to make money with those beats unless they gave them back to me, so if they gave them back to me, I'm interested in giving them a piece of it."
He added, "At the time, there were opportunities I was missing even in that short window."
Ryan continued to explain the case, "It's not that I don't wanna pay at all, we definitely offered money to this guy. Even the jury came back and said yo, a milly is to high. If you read the news they came back and said, we feel like a million dollars is too high. And really we lost the case on a sanction, we got sanctioned because the actual drive, we sent it back to the manufacturer so that they could tell everybody, give us a letter, that the drive is broken, we got that letter back, and unfortunately they wiped the drive and sold it on eBay, so when the lawsuit came and they said, 'look we wanna do forensic research on the drive, see if anything is on there,' the manufacturer was like, 'yo we already sold it on eBay,' so we got punished by the court."
The producer says he will pay the $1 million if he has too, and he does have the funds for it. He goes on to discuss Cassie and her new boyfriend, Diddy and more. Peep the full interview below.