"It happened so fast," he says. His eyes widen, as they usually do when he gets excited, and that million-selling grin creeps across his face. "I was arguing with Gotti, playing with him like, 'Man, I [didn't] get to sit down and do my sh-- the way I really wanted.' He was saying, 'This is your best album.' I'm listening to the songs and I'm like, 'You're right.' I just wanted to sit down and feel like I'm absorbing it all. [Now] I'm just trying soak up the album."

As he plays cut after cut from the record, bouncing around the studio, drinking, smoking, it's as if Ja is finally getting to live in the moment of each track. Listening to his music, he doesn't just press play, he performs the tracks as if he's in front of an audience of thousands, not a half-dozen. One minute he's doing a little woodpeckerlike head nod as a beat comes in. The next he loses himself in the song and starts to dance around, using his hands and facial expressions to act out lines that touch him. Then, through the power of a line from his next single, "Always on Time," he's beamed out of the grimy studio into a sports arena.

"And I love to see that ass in boots and shades," he rhymes along with himself.

"Thug style, you never thought I'd make you smile," he carries on, his eyes closed, removing his 'do rag and leaving just a headband around his head.

"Gotti [didn't] even like this beat," Ja says of his friend, who produced the track. He breaks out into an I-told-you-so ear-to-ear grin. "I had it at my crib, and I was like, 'Yo, that beat is crazy.' " Ja knew he was onto something, but Gotti wasn't hearing it. Needless to say, Ja won that scuffle and Gotti finally saw the light.

As that song fades, the melodic acoustic guitars of "Down Ass Bitch," which features Charli Baltimore, comes on.

"Every thug needs a la-daaaaay," he sings along with the song, flailing his arms.

"I see this one at shows. When I come out, [there's] 30,000 people. I can see it," he says. "It's visual."

"Baby, say yeeeeaaaah," he keeps singing in sync with the song's intro, eyes shut tight, holding an imaginary mic to his mouth. "Baby, say yeeeeaaaah," he repeats, this time with the imaginary mic pointed to the sky, as if to exhort the invisible crowd to back him up.

"This is talking strictly to the women, 'cause you know how it is when you're in the 'hood, you got your chick," he explains as he and Baltimore — a new Murder Inc. member — pledge allegiance to each other on the track playing in the background. "The one that's with you when you're out of town doing your thing. She's with you for the long ride. She's probably going to catch a bullet for you 'cause she's always with you. This here, this is a hustler's woman."

Ja says he caught some drama from his real-life soul mate, wife Aisha, because of the frank relationship scenarios depicted in some of his hit records.

"It's all reality music to me," he says. "It's what we all go through, certain sh-- n----s are afraid to say. 'Between Me and You' — you know how much heat I got from my wife?

"'What do you mean 'between me and you?,' " he says, rolling his eyes and raising the pitch of his voice to mimic Aisha's. "[Other rappers] ain't making that record. They think it every day, but they ain't gonna make it. But I'm gonna put the reality out there."

But for tonight, Ja is going to stay in his own world, at least until Pain Is Love finishes playing on the studio's sound system.

Rhyming along to "Never Again," the scowl on his face is intense as he tells of making sure his life's mistakes don't repeat themselves. "In this world I'm alone and trapped inside this body that's ... out of control/ I'm hitting these streets daily, knowing I got babies to feed and rarely seeing them, really/ This game inhaled me."