DMX's unreleased two-disc gospel album titled, Walk With Me Now and You’ll Fly With Me Later.
DMX Recorded an Unreleased Two-Disc Gospel Album Back in 2008
Rolling Stone reports, on Tuesday (December 28) reveals that while living in Arizona in the late 2000s during a fallow period of his career, Earl Simmons tried to outrun his drug, legal and marriage problems by working on a gospel-influenced double album.
The two-collections was called Walk With Me Now and You’ll Fly With Me Later and was posited as one disc of hip-hop tunes and a second one with profanity-free spiritual rhymes; X always tried to find a slot for a more spiritually focused songs on his first three platinum collections. “No songs about b*tches, no songs about robbing, just straight ‘Give God the glory,’ ” he reportedly said at the time.
According to Rolling Stone, The collection was completed, but never released in the way X intended, some tracks making it into the world against his wishes and the rest locked on hard drives for over a decade. The rapper, who also always made prayer a part of his live sets, recorded the gospel album in Arizona with producer Divine Bars and a local singer named Janyce. DMX reportedly met the latter at the Phoenix Nordstrom’s where she worked after her co-workers encouraged the talent competition winner to sing for the rap superstar.
The status of X’s gospel project, meanwhile, remains unclear. It's stated in Rolling Stone report that businessman Howard Mann has claimed that he has the rights to a number of DMX songs. Mann alleges that X signed over the rights to the gospel album to him, though the two didn’t speak in the last years of the artist’s life.
You can read the full, long-form essay about DMX’s time in Arizona here.
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