Two recent songs from imprisoned Canadian rapper Tory Lanez are having fans wondering how he’s still able to make high-quality music from behind bars.
On Friday, the artist dropped “Cell 245,” an upbeat trap song displaying his prison cell number in the title and the first song he completed while locked up, and “Wish I Never Met You,” an afrobeats-R&B fusion inspired by Lanez’s girl telling him that she cheated on him with his friend over the phone while in jail, in which he later responded with the words in the title track.
Lanez is currently serving a ten-year sentence for gun charges surrounding the shooting of Houston-based rapper Megan Thee Stallion. He is eligible for parole in September 2029.
The “LUV” singer took to social media two days prior to promote the singles meant to be a part of his “Free Tory Playlist,” a weekly series where he’ll be dropping music that he’s been recording in prison.
In a video posted to his Instagram, the entertainer said it took him and his sound engineer between 20 to 30 times to finally find the right recipe on how to record music through phone calls and still keep the quality as professional as he had before.
“I done cracked the f*cking code man,” Lanez said. “Not even these prison walls can stop me.”
The singer says the weekly playlist is “the first of its kind,” and is in good spirits about sharing his music despite the circumstances.
“Although God has already told me that this moment is temporary, it speaks testimony to the fact that no matter where they put me, they can’t lock down my spirit, my ambition, my soul, my passion nor my destiny,” he said in the video.
Fans are baffled on how the singer is able to record songs through prison phone calls and have it still sound like it always has.
“These are damn near studio quality,” a user on Reddit said. “Super impressive engineering tbh.”
“How does he sound so good recording over a jail phone,” another user on the site questioned.
“Some rappers sound trash af in a studio and this guy sounds amazing over a jail phone,” one user said.
Some are skeptical, believing that he utilized other resources to make the songs like previous recordings and artificial intelligence.
“He’s using AI to refine his vocals after he sings through the jail phone,” one user theorized.
“I wonder if this is an old one or they really found a way to have him record,” another user questioned.
“I’m not believing he recorded any of these vocals in prison until he start rapping about some current sh*t,” another user said.
Prison phone calls are usually out in the open, often prone to include noisy backgrounds that aren’t ideal for a soundproof recording. University of Toronto Music Technology Professor Eliot Britton says the possibility of creating music behind bars is realistic due to the advancements in audio technology. He also says the type of music Lanez makes, often layered and production heavy, makes leeway for a successful recording.
“Acoustics of prison phones aside, there are stylistic elements in this music that lend itself to this kind of recording,” Britton said.
“And with current advances in machine learning-based audio restoration, you could easily pull-out background noise.”
Lanez is not the first artist to record from prison. In 1992, West Coast rapper Mac Dre recorded his entire Back n da Hood EP from Fresno County Jail in California. In 2020, late Brooklyn drill artist Pop Smoke’s song “Make It Rain” featured a verse from incarcerated New York rapper Rowdy Rebel, which was recorded telephonically. Meanwhile, Jamaican dancehall artist Vybz Kartel has consistently been releasing multiple new songs from behind bars yearly since his life sentence conviction in 2014.
