Fire Starter: Lucky Don

Brooklyn spitter Lucky Don had dreams that not even his 10-year jail bid could derail. "I knew how to rap before I went to jail," he tells Mixtape Daily. "I always knew how to rap."

With the chips stacked against him, Luck found inspiration in BK rapper Maino, whom he met while the two were locked up in New York's Gowanda Correctional Facility. (Luck was found guilty of shooting at a police officer.) "Me seeing him grow made me feel like I had a chance," he said.

With his mixtape grind in full swing after dropping last year's DJ Self-hosted The Voice, Don linked up with his friend Maino, as well as Bronx rapper Fred the Godson on the TY Fyffe-produced "Let's Go (Remix)." The original version of the song featured Luck by himself, and, at first, he set out to deliver his hardest raps over the bouncy club beat. But then he received a bit of friendly advice from the "Hi Hater" MC.

"We met up on Atlantic and Bedford [in Brooklyn], I pulled up, put the CD in the car and we were just sitting in his car just listening to the beat over and over again," Luck recalled. "He was like, 'Nah, my dude; nah, son. This ain't one of those beats -- later for all that rap stuff right now.' "

At Maino's urging, Luck switched up his flow to something that matched the beat. The song soon became so big on New York's underground that Maino agreed to jump on the remix. Now Don, who's set to release his second mixtape, The Difference, in June, is finally seeing his dreams come to fruition.

"I can't even lie, I love music, I always loved music. I ain't gonna sit here and front like, 'I'm a street n---a and I never really wanted to do this.' This is what I wanted to do. That other Luck that was locked up and all that, I left him back there. I came home to do music."

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