G-Eazy: The West Coast rap heavyweight dishes on ‘Helium’ album, relocating to NYC and being ‘Naked’

Okay - I’m low-key gaslighting with the headline especially in regard to the ‘Naked’ line but I could not resist. It’s a full-fledged conversation going down with Bay Area rap heavyweight G-Eazy and his Apple Music Zane Lowe conversation.

From talking about his newest studio album to dealing with the loss of his day one - mom - and moving to New York City - it’s all ears and eyes for Gerald fanatics.

G-Eazy tells Apple Music about his inspiration for 'Helium'

G-Eazy: For me, on this record, this is the highs and lows of love, man. This is the lightness of love and how lifting it can be, and euphoric. And it's not just love in terms of romantic relationships, but also just love and lust of life. But how fleeting it can feel sometimes too. And the metaphor of helium and it being this... You associate it with bright, colorful balloons of celebration... and they fly, but there's a short period of time. Sometimes a week later, that balloon looks less sexy, all crumpled up, and just barely floating a little-

Zane Lowe: Look, it's one of the saddest images in the world. It's like six days after a birthday party, there's the balloon three inches off the ground. It looks like it needs to be put out of its misery-

G-Eazy: Oh my God, ain't it? But that's-

Zane Lowe: Oh man, give it to the dog.

G-Eazy: And that's what I wanted to cover on this album.

G-Eazy opens up to Apple Music about the loss of his mom 

Zane Lowe: It's never easy. It's the order of things. That's the only positive aspect of that evolution, is that is the order of things. And any parent would want that to be the order of things. But still, you're a young man who lost someone really special to you. And I'm not trying to drag you through that again, but in the context of your music, how did that change the way you moved as an artist, as a human? Because I'd imagine that was when you took a look at yourself and were like, all right, the lessons are going to come from somewhere else, or they're going to come from what I learned already.

G-Eazy: You dig deep and you remember those, and you find ways to keep them with you. There's the initial shock and loneliness of, oh my God, the world just got lonelier now. The room feels much more empty than it did before this. And my mother was my best friend. She was my rock, my hero, my source. And she was an art professor and she was great at critique, and although music wasn't her medium, but she understood… She was smart as a... She was brilliant. The way she would interpret the things I would be working on and what I was trying to say, and ask me, "But what's the thesis of... What are you trying to..." and just pull things out of me. Yeah, so it's at first it was like, whoa, I'm all on my own now. But then you get your bearings and that's maturing into an adult.

G-Eazy tells Apple Music about getting vulnerable on his new song "Naked"

G-Eazy: This song, "Naked," for me was one of the most visceral and just cathartic and revealing and vulnerable, and still found a way to make it... But I had to go there.

Zane Lowe: Where do you have to be to go there? Because that's not something you wake up in the morning and be like, I'm going there. Where do you have to be in your life to be able to unlock that? 

G-Eazy: In a very long conversation with one of my best friends, his name is Nate Turbow. He's my best friend in New York. He lives in a whole different world. He's a painter who lives in Brooklyn, cartoonist, older than me. But he's got a brain out of this world and an encyclopedia of music in his head, and he was playing me a bunch of stuff. And we just had gotten into this long, long, long conversation about pushing art to a brutal place of honesty and truth, and there was one element and story and side I'd never really revealed as G-Eazy.