In the two months since his release from prison after almost three years, we've heard from Gucci Mane a lot. There have been collaborations with Drake, Young Thug and G.O.O.D. Music, a French Montana remix, and a handful of solo songs off of his upcoming album, Everybody Looking.

But he hadn't given an interview since his release until sitting with the New York Times recently, for a story where he touched on everything from life behind bars to his current state of mind.

“It’s been tough to be a Gucci fan,” he said, referencing his continued legal troubles and a history of drug use. “It’s been tough to be a Gucci friend, a Gucci sibling, a Gucci girlfriend or a Gucci partner. I done took people through a lot, man.”

That drug use, though, finally came to a stop while he was in prison, serving a sentence that began in 2013 for weapons charges. But getting to that point of sobriety wasn't a cakewalk.

“It feel like death," he said, thinking back to those early days without drugs. "Your body just craving lean bad. Stomach tore up, can’t think straight. Just mad at the world. Temper so short, so violent, so aggressive. So just rude and toxic.”

From there, he put his energy toward his health, both physical and mental. He worked out — his body looks drastically different now than when he went in — and read the Bible and self-help books. And he also started writing rhymes, an act he hadn't done in years, having chosen instead to freestyle his raps.

Now he's delivering those raps to the world, with his Everybody Looking album, due out this Friday. Half of it was written while he was locked up, and the other half came during his current house arrest. The entire project was recorded in six days, and "First Day Out tha Feds," which dropped the day after his release, was finished within an hour of his getting home.

“I can’t say I felt happy my last six, seven years in the music business,” he said. “I was just numb. You told me that I was doing good or told me I was doing bad, you hated me or loved me, either which way I greeted with nonchalance. It was sincere nonchalance — like, I really didn’t care."

That outlook, it sounds like, is a thing of the past.

Make sure to check out the entire story over at the Times.