Young Thug Says He Doesn't Write Down Lyrics, Prefers To Freestyle

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Thugger only writes his bars when he’s locked up.

2021 was one of Young Thug‘s biggest years of his career. Dropping both his label Young Stoner Life’s star-studded compilation album Slime Language 2 in April and his own solo studio album Punk in OctoberThug achieved two Billboard 200 No. 1 albums this year.

As he is undoubtably one of Atlanta’s most successful and influential trap artists, which he says is the #1 city for hip-hop, Thug revealed even more of his brilliance this week.

In a recent interview with i-D, Young Thug claimed he does not write down any of his lyrics, mostly free-styling his bars: “I’ve never written a lyric. Ever. I really haven’t. I kind of just freestyle. I just go with it as it comes. I never really wrote anything down. I’m not patient enough to sit and write. It just takes a lot of my day.”

He continued by saying he would only consider writing lyrics down if he was in jail, because that would be the only place he’d have the time to do so: “Only time I’ve had the time to write lyrics down is when I’ve been incarcerated. Even if I just have to go to jail for a day or something. I don’t like writing and that’s the only way I can write; if I just got time on my hands and there’s nothing in the world I could do.”

When asked which is his favorite lyric of his, he cited his bar from “Family Don’t Matter,” off of his 2017 solo album Beautiful Thugger Girls: “Trying to kill these bastards like family don’t matter is probably one of the top ones, to me because f how important family is to me. You know, that’s probably why I like it. It’s like, ‘Fuck, like, you actually said it.”

This is a trend a good amount of rappers nowadays follow, where they prefer to freestyle their songs instead of writing and pre-meditating their lyrics.

Watch Young Thug‘s brief interview below.