Echo Recording Studios is not an easy place to find. The unmarked building is lodged in a cluster of industrial structures on a ragged stretch of Southwest Atlanta lined with vacant houses, hair salons and meandering junkies. Before entering, guests wait in front of a surveillance camera, until a chain-link fence wound with razor wire slides open. The yellow Ferrari, silver Porsche and stretch limousine parked in the protected courtyard are early clues that this is not an ordinary warehouse. The entrance to the actual studio is via another secure doorway, this one protected by a large cage of thick metal bars. And deep within this prisonlike tangle of steel and wire is Clifford “T.I.” Harris, a free man.

Seated on a swivel chair, beneath a collection of closed-circuit monitors, on a warm evening, T.I. is under observation too. The small mixing room is packed with a camera crew, a VJ with wholesome R&B-singer looks, an engineer and assorted label personnel. Dressed casually but crisply—in dark denim jeans, an army-style button-up, a Red Sox fitted and Air Jordan sneakers—the 29-year-old rapper is illuminated by a halo of camera lights that glint off the chunky watch wrapped around his wrist. With recently recorded songs blaring from the speakers, T.I. mouths the lyrics, his fingers dancing in midair, his wrist flicking to punctuate snare hits. There’s a Jersey Shore–bound anthem plucked from the same peapod as 2008’s Rihanna-led “Live Your Life” single (complete with boisterous “ayes!” and all). There’s a poppy love song that the VJ breathlessly proclaims to be his favorite. And then there’s another track, a mean one, that T.I. penned while incarcerated in federal prison last year. Here, he growls about grabbing a knife to “leave a nigga drippin’ like a sippy cup.” The smile plastered on the VJ’s face turns waxen. “That one’s more aggressive,” T.I. says of the song. “Prison kind of shook my mind up a bit. It woke something up in my mind that was gone.”

After completing the last three months of his yearlong jail sentence at an Atlanta halfway house—a punishment stemming from federal weapons charges—T.I. has come home. Things are different, and not just because he no longer shares a room with five cell mates. The terrain upon which he built his empire—six albums, a closet stuffed with RIAA-certified gold and platinum plaques, his Grand Hustle Records label, big endorsement deals, millions of dollars in the bank—has shifted. T.I.’s vacated position as ATL’s most-celebrated dope boy is crowded with candidates like Gucci Mane, Jeezy, hell, even Waka Flocka Flame. The Billboard pop charts T.I. dominated with smash singles from his last album, 2008’s double-platinum Paper Trail, have become a playpen for babies such as Drake and B.o.B (an artist on T.I.’s Grand Hustle Records no less). Still, with his seventh album, King Uncaged, due late this summer, Tip’s not ready to cede his crown. “The term ‘King of the South’ did not exist before me,” says T.I. between sips from a Heineken bottle.

“The term cannot be passed along unless I choose to pass it along.”

With a small frame, a head slightly too large for his body, and intense features, T.I. doesn’t look like a grizzled rap veteran who’s spent the last decade battling for primacy beneath the Mason-Dixon Line. But he has aged. While the youthful version of T.I. charged out of Cobb County jail in 2004 with sneering defiance, after serving time for violating probation, the contemporary model is far more subdued. To be sure, a mature, civic-minded T.I. can still sell records. Paper Trail, his sixth effort that included several singles with inspirational and reflective themes, was responsible for his most-notable moments of commercial success to date. But the LP was also cleansed of the gunplay, drug dealing and bristling menace that characterized so much of his earlier music. The duality expressed on T.I.’s 2007 split-personality album, T.I. Vs T.I.P., seemed questionable to some critics then, but he contains multitudes. There’s the public facade (entertainer, executive, faithful fiancé on the straight and narrow), and then there’s the other T.I. (a reckless thug who bought a stack of machine guns on the day of the 2007 BET Hip-Hop Awards). Only he knows where one ends and the other begins—or if they both still exist.

T.I. spent much of the last year counting calendar days in a low-security federal prison in Forrest City, Arkansas, in a room with five other inmates. The 185-man dormitory was spartan in comparison to his mansion overlooking Georgia’s Lake Spivey, but it wasn’t without some comforts. Behind bars, he was able to coach sports, play handball and tinker around with musical instruments. Tip says he never felt any sense of danger, but admits to having a few disagreements over “principle.”

The sequence of events that ended with T.I.’s incarceration began on May 3, 2006, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Following a concert, his entourage was involved in an altercation with locals at an after-party. As a van carrying T.I. and his crew cruised along Interstate 75, a green Jeep Cherokee drew alongside and riddled their vehicle with bullets. When they pulled over, Tip’s childhood friend Philant Johnson was lifeless, an entry wound in his left temple. “I felt all those rounds were fired for me,” T.I. later told the courtroom during the November 2008 trial of Hosea Thomas, the man sentenced to 66 years in prison for pulling the trigger.

A few weeks after the bloodshed in Cincinnati, T.I. booked a New York City recording studio for himself and Grand Hustle artists Young Dro and Alfamega. If his anguish appeared under control on the surface, his state of mind was revealed in the booth. Over a jarring, violent beat, he snarled threats and promised vengeance upon enemies. Sadly, any therapeutic benefits were negated by interruptions caused by an inept engineer. At first, T.I. was friendly, offering encouragement, weed and beer. But when technical difficulties dragged on for hours, his mood darkened.

After the engineer made another mistake, an angry Tip threatened him from the vocal booth. “I ain’t going back to jail for you,” the rapper said. “Don’t make me fuck you up.” A few minutes later, after another trip up by the engineer, T.I. rushed from the booth like a whirlwind in a white V-neck, yanked the man from his seat and dragged him out into the adjoining hallway. Tip could be seen barking into the engineer’s face through an interior studio window. The engineer went ashen.

T.I. remembers the incident as part of a tumultuous time. “I just had a lot of mixed emotions, a lot of unchanneled aggression that I had not yet found ways to deal with properly,” he says. “It started coming out at different points and periods of time, minor situations. I just spazzed out and spiraled out of control, little by little.” T.I. twisted into the abyss, and his landing at rock bottom was not a soft one. -XXL