DX: Strength & Loyalty. It demonstrates your maturity and understanding. What did it take to get to that point?
KB: Basically, just living life. Going through different experiences that we go through and living day-to-day. As we grow older, our music grows with us. Everybody said it was a more mature album - that’s because we have grown and we’ve gotten more mature. So of course our music is gonna change, our train of thought is gonna change. It changes along with us.

DX: What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned so far?
KB: You have to be on your business; it’s not just about the music. Even though people would get in and think that that’s what it’s only about – the music and having a good time and doing shows and just traveling around the world. You really have to know what’s going on with your business in order for you to be happy - or be ready to try other things or retire. You really have to be on your business.

DX: The album had many features which were diverse in themselves (including Akon, Mariah and The Game). Did you have a specific listener in mind before creating it?
WB: Not really; we basically just went in and spun collaborations and we reached out to Akon; our people reached out, and he said he’d do it. We just looked at it like, “Man, it’d be a great collaboration because he’s different and we’re definitely different.” All the other songs came about like all our songs usually do; we just go in there, pick the tracks, sit in a circle and collab…and we come with our music.
KB: And the reason why we have so many collaborations on the album is because we’ve never done it before. That’s not something people are used to seeing Bone do. So that was like a big part of us being different because it’s something we’ve never done before; we hadn’t been out in a while; we was like “We need to do something totally different,” and that seemed to be the best thing at the time - us collabing with a lot of different artists. And it worked out real good too.

DX: How influential was Swizz to the project?
WB: The album kicked off in Swizz Beatz’ studio as we first got to him when he reached out to us. We went down there and knocked out a whole bunch of songs in two weeks; he kick-started the whole thing. He was very influential.

DX: The group had publicized problems in the past. Looking back, how has that affected your music and do you feel that there was pressure with this album to remedy everything for Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and return to the music, and return to the fans?
KB: It definitely was because all the negative things and all the negative publicity can tend to take you away from the music and the creative side of things. So we definitely tried to put that all aside and get what we learned and put it into the music and the hard times we went through – and we went from there.

DX: Age-old question: where does the group stand with Bizzy Bone?
WB: As far as the Bizzy situation, it ain’t really no really hard feelings. It’s just like you said, we’re grown men now and we can’t conduct our business as if we don’t know what we’re doing; and basically, that wasn’t the same [route] he was going at the time. [One monkey doesn't stop the show], and we gotta keep it moving.

DX: What can we expect from Bone Thugs-N-Harmony this year?
WB: Real heart-felt music. We’re always gonna do that, keep it coming like that. We got another movie coming out, Ghetto Cowboys. We got our artists coming out on our labels, and basically, [we’re] keeping our head above the water.

DX: Wanna touch on Ghetto Cowboys real quick?
KB: Basically we’re just getting started; we just did the first draft of the paperwork. So it’s still in the early beginning stages. And we’re working on trying to get the casting done and all that. You’ll definitely be hearing more about it as we get further along in the project.

DX: Concept?
KB: It’s a black western…it’s a different time period, 1800s. There’s a little history in it, about slavery, about the army – basically about black cowboys; outlaws.