Via: MTV

Despite praise from critics and a strong buzz on the internet, sales of Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor were lower than expected. His next album The Cool is tentatively set for a summer release and this time around he's done extra planning to prevent some of the problems associated with the bootlegging of Food & Liquor.

"The timing is gonna be pop, pop, pop," he explained. "There's gonna be a lot of setup and a lot of preproduction on this album, so it's gonna be in pieces. But the pieces won't come together, seriously, until like three weeks before it comes out. We'll probably record everything in, like, a week. So we're just gonna get it all together, map it out, have it done to a T, and then go and record. Then fresh from the studio, fresh to mastering ... so it eliminates a lot of time and error that was surrounding [my debut]."

For The Cool, Lupe plans to keep the high-profile guest appearances down aside from possibly a Kanye West beat. Instead he plans on keeping all the guest spots and production in-house through his First & Fifteenth Entertainment team. Lupe also plans on keeping many of the same characters found on Food & Liquor on the next album.

He expressed delight that most of his fans didn't notice certain characters on Food that he plans to bring back throughout The Cool. "It's gonna be weird," Fiasco said of the idea. "People are gonna see it and be like, 'Wow, ain't that the dude from this song?' I'm building concepts now for the album," he continued. "I got the title, and I work top down. ... This album is gonna be a bit more streamlined and a little bit more focused, I guess you could say.
"Not a concept album," he continued. "But I been wrestling with how to make the concept about what I want to make the album about fit but still have enough room where it's just not a full-on story about somebody else. Where you still get all the '' what I think are '' necessary ingredients to do a good, good album."