Lil Dicky is doing a lot of rapping on TV this week — but the “Lemme Freak” artist still has some ‘splaining to do about why he hasn’t dropped an album in nearly five years.
The rapper, whose real name is Dave Burd, came clean about the real reason why it’s taken him so long to release new music in a recent interview with TheWrap ahead of Wednesday’s premiere of his semi-autobiographical FXX series, “Dave.”
“I’m a no-stone-unturned kind of artist,” he explained. “I haven’t put an album out for four and a half years. At this point, my fans are like ‘What the hell is wrong with you, man?”
It’s a decision he addressed in a heartfelt Instagram post earlier this year, but the rapper hopes that “Dave” will shed some more light on the reasons behind his slow creative process. Perhaps watching him play himself on a TV show will help all those music-hungry Dickheads — that’s what his fans call themselves — glean some understanding about the “perfectionist” tendencies that have kept him from dropping an album since 2015’s “Professional Rapper.”
“In the show, you’ll see what kind of person I am,” he said. “Maybe [my fans] will understand to an extent, ‘Oh, so this is why it takes him so long to do X, Y or Z,’” he said. “But really, I just wanted people to see me for me. If it helps my fans to see, ‘Oh he’s like a perfectionist — I see that through his character in the show, I now understand why it could take a guy like him four and a half years to finish an album.’”
As for when exactly the album will drop, Burd still doesn’t have a super concrete timeline, but he hopes to have it out by the end of 2020.
“I gotta finish it. The sooner the better, I’ll say that. I could finish it in a month, or it could take me 15 years,” he joked before quickly taking it back.
“It won’t take 15 years. At a certain point, I’m just gonna have to put my foot down and just do it,” he said. “I’m a few songs away still.”
Until then, the Dickheads of the world will just have to be patient.