In the making of this post, I actually found out more than I probably ever needed to know on the forthcoming Lasers, including how the album nearly drove Lupe to suicide.

Anyway, as promised in the Wednesday newsletter, albeit a little late due to my being uncharacteristically sick yesterday, here’s everything you need to know about Lasers up until this point:

Click Here To Read More After The Jump….

Let’s start off with the tracklist:

01. Letting Go (feat. Sarah Green)
02. Words I Never Said (feat. Skylar Grey)
03. Till I Get There
04. I Don’t Wanna Care Right Now (feat. MDMA)
05. Out Of My Head (feat. Trey Songz)
06. The Show Goes On
07. Beautiful Lasers, (Two Ways) (feat. MDMA)
08. Coming up (feat. MDMA)
09. State Run Radio (feat. Matt Mahaffey)
10. Break The Chain (feat. Eric Turner & Sway)
11. All Black Everything
12. Never Forget You (feat. John Legend)

Apparently the Deluxe Edition will feature “I’m Beamin'”.

Nothing too out of the ordinary. Some may be surprised to see the likes of Trey Songz and Sway on there, but Lupe has said himself recently, “The purpose of art has always been commercial,” this album will likely be received by clubs a lot better than his first two albums.

Lupe’s doing something fairly unique for this release. Similar to the Kanye’s “Good Friday” series, in which Ye released a track every Friday up to Christmas, Fiasco has decided to release specific tracks on Itunes leading up to the release of Lasers on March 8th (March 7th on Itunes). This is an interesting marketing concept from Lu. He’s been known to get extremely frustrated – and rightly so – with bootleggers in the past, and has been criticised by many for taking his whining on to internet forums to confront fans and haters username-to-username. So only time will tell if this latest ploy by the Fiasco team will work out in his favour.

It would seem he’s hoping that by releasing specific tracks he’s hoping to entice listeners in to buying the album. Here’s some of the tracks that have dropped thus far, including the slew of freestyles Lu has released and a list of the tracks to drop before March 8th:

Lupe Fiasco – “Words I Never Said”

Lupe Fiasco – “H.A.M Freestyle”

Lupe Fiasco ft. John Legend – “Never Forget You” BUY HER

Lupe Fiasco – Moment 4 Life Freestyle

Lupe Fiasco – All Black Everything

For succinct breakdown of “All Black Everything” look no further than Matthew Trammel’s piece at The Madbury Club.

Get the full Westwood freestyle session HERE.

Tracks still to come from Lu before the album drops are:

March 1: “Outta My Head” ft. Trey Songz
March 1: “Coming Up”

Now there was once a time, a darker time, when it appeared as though us, the good people, wouldn’t actually be blessed with Lasers. We all remember the petition and protest after Lasers was, at first, rejected by Atlantic records who were reportedly giving the chi-town hero a hard time. In a recent interview with Complex magazine, Lupe revealed how the whole ordeal affected him more than he let on:

“But when Fiasco submitted his first Lasers tracks two and a half years ago, his label, Atlantic, rejected them as not commercial enough, according to Darrale Jones, his A&R rep. “I don’t know how to do what Kanye does,” Fiasco says matter-of-factly. “I don’t have that Midas touch.” A creative clash ensued: Atlantic froze his production budget. Fiasco asked to be released from his contract. The label refused. By his own account, Fiasco descended into a deep funk. On “Beautiful Lasers,” one of the album’s standout songs, he raps over a reverberating gothic beat: “If you feel like you don’t want to be alive, you feel just like I am.” Did he really contemplate suicide? “To keep from killing somebody else,” he says. “The creation of Lasers was a very painful, dark, fucked-up process.”

Read More HERE.