Today, REAL 92.3’s Big Boy premiered his latest interview with Killer Mike, who is currently promoting his sixth studio LP, MICHAEL. “It took us like two-and-a-half, three years [to create this album]. Me and Cuz Lightyear, who A&Red it. Me and Cuz were working on a joint mixtape together,” he said before revealing that his collaborator stepped back to allow him to put his all into a solo effort. “We approached it from a different way. We recorded 39 records; we ended up using 15. Our whole thing was if the beat didn’t move us in the first 30 seconds, we weren’t wasting time trying to figure it out.”

He also spoke on having dyslexia. “I can’t always read my own writing (laughs). I got diagnosed in like [the] 11th grade. [My grandmother] would just say, ‘Read it again.’ That was her thing. ‘You know it ain’t a D,'” Mike recalled. “By the time I was diagnosed, I had figured it out. I had some great teachers at Frederick Douglass High School and they were just patient with me. My grandmother was just relentless on reading.”

He continued, “It wasn’t so severe that it threw me off traumatically. Once I understood what was going on in my brain, I understand [that] you just have to read things three times, you have to read slower, you gotta be cognitive enough to know that this doesn’t make sense.”

MICHAEL arrived back in June with a wealth of collaborations alongside André 3000, CeeLo Green, Mozzy, Young Thug, 6LACK, Jagged Edge, Ty Dolla $ign, Curren$y, 2 Chainz, and more. In addition to receiving high praise, the Atlanta talent’s latest body of work charted well in both the United Stated and the United Kingdom following its debut week of release.