Almost two weeks
after several tracks from his forthcoming album Alter Ego were leaked
onto the Internet, singer/actor Tyrese is speaking out on the incident.
"It’s
an engineer who leaked my s**t," Tyrese revealed to AllHipHop.com. "It’s
one of the cats I just started working with. It’s one of them. We just
trying to figure out which one."
Alter Ego
is a new dual disc CD which features Tyrese crooning R&B songs on disc one,
while he introduces his rap alias Black-Ty on the second disc.
The album includes
cameos from Snoop Dogg, Paul Wall, Chingy, the Game, Guerilla Black, and Kurupt
as well as production from the Frontline Boyz.
At least seven
to eight R&B and Hip-Hop songs slated for the album were leaked, Tyrese
admitted, adding that the leak has caused him to go back into the studio to
redo and re-tweak the stolen material.
"It’s
one of those situations where you got a bunch of different engineers working
in the studio and I got about at least five or six engineers I deal with and
one of them decided they just gonna take some joints off of my computer,"
said Tyrese, who added that he heard the perpetrators were attempting to sell
the tracks to someone. "Other than that, there was supposed to be some
other records on there that I was about to put out on my first mixtape with
DJ Warrior."
Although his new
movie Waist Deep arrives in theaters Friday (June 23), Tyrese is quick
to dismiss any rumors of the album leak being a publicity stunt.
"I want people
to know this ain’t a publicity stunt because at the end of the day, if
it was a publicity stunt, then songs that are leaked on the net would be mixed,
and mastered and they would be songs that I want people to hear," said
the entertainer/businessman. "You want people to hear you at your best.
When you just in there cutting and f**king around, trying to figure everything
out and some of the records get leaked, that’s just not the way you want
to go about [it]. But some records that are on there that are out there are
important, but others are like well, they’re out there now. So it’s
all good."
Tyrese’s mixtape
with DJ Warrior, which features 50 Cent, hits stores June 27. Alter Ego
is slated to arrive in late fall.