Lil Wayne Producers Cool & Dre Say Rebirth Has Some Rock, Some Rap

'It's where Lil Wayne is right now in his life and career,' Dre says of upcoming LP.

Even the biggest MC in the game right now gets hungry for new music. "He just told us, 'Feed me, feed me,' " Cool of the producing duo Cool & Dre laughed about Lil Wayne. The twosome have been busy putting together tracks for Wayne's Rebirth LP, which is slated for a summer release.

"The best way to describe the Rebirth record is that it's a Lil Wayne record," Cool's partner Dre said. "It's where Lil Wayne is right now in his life and career — he's expressing himself musically. 'Prom Queen' came out and that's a rock record and so everybody is like, 'He's putting out a rock album and he's on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.' Yeah, there's some rock records on there, but there's also some records where he's rapping. It's a Lil Wayne album. It's what you expect from Lil Wayne, where he's at creatively.

"It's almost like where Outkast was when they made Aquemini," he continued. "It's still a rap album, but was it really a rap album compared to all the other rap albums at that time? André Benjamin was evolving artistically to where he's at now — Wayne is doing the same thing, and he's not afraid to show you his growth. It's one thing we respect about him, and we feel it's something that everybody else should respect about him ... hes shows no fear. To put himself out there, you're watching someone as they progress in their career.

"He paid his dues, he put out a million mixtapes and he put out classic albums ... Rebirth is going to be another classic album," he added.

Cool & Dre were inspired to take a new musical direction with Wayne after seeing his rock rendition of "Got Money" on "Saturday Night Live."

"His intensity was like [being at] a rock concert," Cool said of the performance. "He had a band behind him. It inspired me and Dre to do a lot of intensity-driven records."

"Anthemic records," Dre echoed. "We wanted to create music for him that could stand beside his performance, which is tough. The way he was performing, I can only compare him to Freddie Mercury or Jim Morrison, guys that put it all out onstage. We felt like, 'Yo, we feel we could provide you with music that could stand alongside what you do as a performer onstage.' He was like, 'Yo, get me some stuff.' "

And the two friends have been feeding Weezy ever since. That's Dre singing on "Hot Revolver," a record that could possibly have been Rebirth's first single if it had not been leaked — although without any promotion, the song charted on iTunes and the Billboard Hot 100. Cool & Dre did not know exactly what other songs of theirs Weezy would be using, but they had a good idea — however, Cash Money wants to keep the titles of the newly recorded material under wraps.