Exclusive: "When you're missing a member out of your family, B," Raekwon says, "it's never the same."
As Wu-Tang Clan prepares for the December 2 release of its forthcoming A Better Tomorrow album, Raekwon said that recording without group member Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who passed away in 2004, has left a void.
"Its real deep bro, because we miss that energy,” Raekwon says during an exclusive interview with HipHopDX that premiered in the DX Daily Friday (October 3). "When he come in the room and be like, ‘What is this? What’s going on?' Or if he didn't like something, he would let you know he didn't like it. If he loved it, he came in the room and was overjoyed with love from his side. So I kind of just miss the energy of him being around, him just being there, or just spotting him from across the room like, 'Look at this dude over there.' But at the end of the day, once you miss a member out of your family B, it’s never the same. All due praises to Ol' Dirty, though.”
At a press release at Warner Bros. Records last week, RZA said that the group’s mission is "to inspire a better tomorrow.”
“The album has a small concept in a sense, musically it travels from a guy who is going through difficulties, tries to find himself, gets involved with some violence, some troubles, but then realizes that it's best sometimes to walk away from the past and all the bad times and maybe work on making his life better, and making a better tomorrow,” RZA said during an interview published in Billboard last week. "The process of making this album was very unique for me. I started first in my home studio in L.A., then I went to my buddy Adrian Younge and I went to his basement in Southern California where he has all this old '60s equipment that he be using.”