Damian Lillard of the Portland Trail Blazers dribbles the ball during their game against the Golden State Warriors at Chase Center in San Francisco on Feb. 28, 2023. Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images.

NBA superstar, rapper and entrepreneur Damian Lillard has had four hits over the past week, and on Tuesday, revealed that he has another one planned for this summer: a new album.

The Portland Trail Blazers’ 11-year point guard won the NBA All-Star 3-Point Contest in Salt Lake City on Feb. 18. The next day, he hit the game-winning three-pointer at the All Star Game. Then, after his team got stuck on its plane during a rare Portland blizzard on Feb. 22, The Oakland native, who records and performs as Dame D.O.L.L.A., wrote a freestyle rap that the Blazers’ videographer filmed, and that went viral nationwide. He topped off his amazing run on Feb. 26 with a 71-point masterclass in a game against the Houston Rockets, which is tied for the eighth-most ever scored in any NBA game, ever.

Speaking after the game against the Golden State Warriors at Chase Center on Feb. 28, Lillard said his new album, his fifth, is tentatively titled Don D.O.L.L.A., and will be released this summer.

“I had more time to work on that than a lot of my other ones because I was hurting most of the time when I was working on the music,” Lillard said of his time recovering from an abdominal injury and surgery in 2022. “I didn’t wanna rush it out. I just wanted to focus on this season. I put a lot of energy into this season, but when this season is over, it’ll be coming.”

Lillard also said the album will have numerous features, which are already recorded.

 

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“I don’t wanna put those names out there yet, but the music is already done,” he said. “Obviously, Lil Wayne has been on every one of my albums, so … at this point, he’s gotta be on it. Wayne is on this album, again. And we got some new features that haven’t been on my albums—some artists I listen to that I really like. You’ll see.”

Dame D.O.L.L.A. said he thinks of his third album, 2019’s Big D.O.L.L.A., as his overall best, while 2021’s Different On Levels The Lord Allowed features his strongest writing. He hopes Don D.O.L.L.A. will show listeners his growth.

“All my music is just me,” Lillard said of his influences on the forthcoming album. “It’s where I am at the time; me reflecting and me looking at where my life is, and things that have played a part in getting me to where I am. It’s always been like that. It’s why music is therapeutic for me. But I think this one is gonna make people see, like, ‘This dude really does music. It keeps getting better.'”

Lillard also provided some more details about what led up to his viral rap on the Trail Blazers’ team plane in the snow storm. The video came together six hours into the team’s delayed flight to Sacramento, and only minutes before it was canceled and the players disembarked. They had been passing the time playing cards and listening to music.

“We was talking, ‘Man, we should have stayed home,'” Lillard said.

Then, rapper OG Kindog’s “Tomorrow” remix came on, and the players got to talking about the beat.

“Obviously everybody on our team knows that I rap. So they was like, ‘Dame, spit something,'” he said. “And I was like, ‘I’m gonna write something real quick.’ I took eight, nine, 10 minutes to write my little rap. … We had been on there the whole time, and we did the video probably five minutes before we got off the plane.”

The quickly tracked-down team videographer Tristan Brillanceau-Lewis filmed the video. Lillard said that he wrote all of the recorded lyrics himself. Trail Blazer Justice Winslow also wrote some bars that he was going to rap but ended up letting Lillard have all the lines.

While most everyone was impressed by the performance, there has been disagreement over what constitutes a “freestyle,” since Lillard was clearly reading his lyrics from his phone. Lillard said he sees both sides.

“My definition of a freestyle is when it’s just off the top of the head, you know? It’s not written,” he said. “But I think what people do now is, if it’s not a song that you’re putting together and you’re rapping over a beat, they call it a freestyle, but everyone knows it’s a written freestyle. So there’s freestyle freestyle, which is like the original, off the top, nothing written; you just come at it as the beat plays. And then there’s the written freestyle, which is what you see a lot of rappers do on these shows … when they doing media runs for their unreleased music that they’re about to put out. They rap on these platforms, and a lot of those are written freestyles. You’re going to showcase your bars: how clever you are, your ability to write bars. So that was a written freestyle. I was reading off my phone.”

He said he writes bars over already-released beats sometimes for fun.

“Sometimes I record them, and I listen to them in the car so that I could memorize them,” he said. “That’s when I rap on them on camera. So you wouldn’t see me reading it, but it would still be a written freestyle.”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.