Lil Wayne didn’t want a small problem like being in jail to interfere with plans for his new album. ‘I Am Not A Human Being’ was released digitally last month and comes out physically next Tuesday (October 19).

The album was completed shortly before Wayne began a year’s sentence at famed New York City prison,  Rikers Island, for a 2007 weapons charge.

Before he began his term in March, he set up a Twitter account and launched a website to keep fans informed. Who’s doing the actual informing? That would be Lil Twist, the teenage Texan rapper who opened for him at a concert and was subsquently taken under Lil Wayne’s wing. Time to return the favour it seems.

Wayne’s manager, Cortez Bryant, says it was important to Wayne that fans had something new to keep them going while his client was otherwise unavailable. “For about a month and a half he was in the studio just recording, knowing that he didn’t want to disappear. He wanted his fans to have something while he was in there. He said to me, 'I want people to still feel like I’m here'."

Originally the material (which features collaborations with Drake and Nicki Minaj) was to have been released as an EP but there was simply too much of it. The strategy seems to have paid off. The album was downloaded 110,000 times in its first week of release and ‘Right Above It’, the first single featuring Drake, debuted on top of the Billboard Hot Digital Songs Chart.

With time off for good behaviour, Lil Wayne is due to be released from jail on November 4.

Watch Lil Wayne's 'Drop the World' video featuring Eminem below: