Lil Wayne Opens Up About Suicide Attempt

Lil Wayne's Carter V is coming soon. Possibly on next Friday, September 21.

As part of the promo for the much-delayed album, there's a big Lil Wayne feature in Billboard. In it, they discuss one track on the album.

When he was 12, Wayne came across a gun in his mother’s house and shot himself in the chest, just missing his heart. In the past, he has called this an accident. But on the new verse he plays, Wayne admits this was a suicide attempt, undertaken after his mother told him he would no longer be allowed to rap. The track, which samples British R&B singer Sampha’s brooding but hopeful 2013 song “Indecision” and will be the album’s outro, was on the original album tracklist, but Wayne added new lyrics this summer, following the suicides of designer Kate Spade and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain.

Wayne has acknowledged the childhood incident was a suicide attempt, rather than the accident he originally portrayed it as, in some of his more recent lyrics. According to Young Money President Mack Maine, Wayne is going to discuss it more thoroughly on Carter V because he thinks it may help people.

“He just told me one day that he was ready to address it now,” says Maine. “Just being an adult, reaching a level of maturity and comfort where it’s like, ‘I want to talk about this because I know a lot of people out here might be going through that.’”