If you haven’t read this T.I. interview yet, do so. As for the backstory, some questions will remain unanswered until time sorts things out. What’s left is after the jump…

T.I. leans back into the cushions of a well-worn sofa in the doorless green room of Atlanta’s Artisan PictureWorks studio. One foot touches the floor, the other rests high up on the sofa cushion, giving him the posture of a patient settling in for a long session at his shrink’s office. But really, he’s a man on the losing side of a war with time. On September 1, T.I. and his wife Tameka “Tiny” Cottle were pulled over for an illegal U-Turn while he was in L.A. promoting the film Takers. The officer claimed he smelled marijuana and an ensuing search turned up four ecstasy pills.

That’s how the T.I. story (“Mercy Me“) begins in the latest issue of VIBE. If you’ve read it, you know that he spoke on his drug use (oxycontin, hydrocodone, etc…), how it came about (pain pills habit after dental surgery) and how he has been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, as well as a whole heap of other un-hip-hopy things he’s gotten himself into (group therapy, for instance). If you peeped it, you know that he gave his most personal and revealing interview to date.

I’ve interviewed T.I. many times. He’s always the same. He’s upbeat, charming, clever and generally thoughtful. The old stereotypes of rappers in interviews-mealy mouthed, hunched over, or inattentive and belligerent-don’t apply to Tip. He greets you with a ‘sappnin’ and on your way out he hits you with a “be easy.” But this meeting exposed a different man-defensive, defeated and hurting. More uneasy than be easy.

It started off very much like a therapy session. Like the kind you see in the movies or on cable (or every Monday at 1pm in real life, so they tell me). But T.I. wasn’t playing the role of ol’ ham fisted Tony Soprano, spazzing out on his shrink and running the gamut of emotions before the closing credits. He was more precise, more in control. Until I asked him how he developed a drug habit. That’s when he sat up, shifted in his seat and eyed the foot traffic zipping back and forth just out that doorless doorway.

He hopped up. “C’mon, follow me.”

He opened the door to the Maybach in the parking lot.

“Let’s talk in here, more private,” he said.

All clean on the outside, his car. Inside, not. Towels were everywhere, a bag of clothes, a bunch of DVDs, including some uncut season of Family Guy, water bottles. Whatever. He moved fast tidying up the joint, snatching up the towels, pushing his clothes to the side. A person close to Tip later told me that he covers his butter soft leather seats with the towels as protection. “A pet peeve of his. He hates when the jeans color rubs off onto his leather.” Apparently, all rappers cover the seats of their hundred thousand dollar cars with five dollar towels. “I got in Khalid’s car once, he does the same thing.”

Me: “Man, you live up in here?”

Tip: “Nah. I just make sure I have a bag for the day and whatever I need for the day.”

In there, we conducted most of the interview. He explained how he was beat down by the process, how he felt like he is being judged unfairly and how, this time, he is not the harshest judge of himself. He was spent. His eyes were heavy. And then he said, what he was feeling, that pretty much summed it all up. “I’m tired, man, I’m just tired of this shit.” It wasn’t an angry growl or a defiant bark. It was a gasp of submission. He was trying to convey the emotional fatigue that lives beyond the bone-tired designation. It’s the down-to-the-spirit exhaustion that has overtaken him.

Naturally, you want to know how tired?

Me: Have you ever considered ending it all?

Tip: Man, I mean, I felt like dying but I ain’t never consider killing myself.

How do you feel like dying but not killing yourself?

I felt like it would be easier to die than to go through whatever it is that I got to go through. I never considered killing myself. But I’ve definitely gotten tired. That’s the most difficult thing about being strong and resilient; nobody can ever tell when you had enough. They always feel like, He can take it. Nobody ever considers enough is enough. Nobody ever takes that into consideration. They feel like, He can take it. He’s strong.

What types of situations have driven you to the edge like that?

This situation is one of them. Once again, I’m not going to hurt myself, not going to kill myself. I might not shy away from dangerous situations as a rational person may. Due to that, I may be even more eager to put myself in harm’s way. But I’m not going to kill myself.

This is not our first pre-prison talk. I interviewed Tip weeks before the release of Paper Trial, the album he would drop before going to jail for possessing and attempting to purchase a bunch of bad-ass guns (assault rifles with silencers). That was before he picked up his drug habit, according to him. Back then, though he had a sentencing cloud hanging over his head, he was easing on down his road to redemption.

He explained his defiant stance in the face of critics over the years.

“When I did ‘Still Ain’t Forgave Myself’ nobody could have been more critical of me than I could of myself. Whereas ‘No Matter What’…if I had been as critical of myself as everyone else was being of me, I would have been under the ground. There had to be some resilience shown. They had to know that I was going to withstand any conditions, overcome any obstacles, rise above and beyond anything in my way-no matter what.”

Now, it’s as if all the harsh thoughts have reached a critical mass, along with the sentence that has taken a toll on his life. Still outwardly defiant in some ways, he has a deeper and internal battle going on that he’s been fighting longer than we know. I think that interview exposed some of that. The one posted below shows the other side.