Lil Jon stopped by ABC’s Nightline to promote his recently released memoir I Only Shout So You Can Hear Me and touched on some pretty emotional topics.
While speaking with ABC News correspondent Stephanie Ramos for Wednesday night’s (Oct. 21) episode, the Atlanta producer talked about how he felt when he found out that the father that raised him wasn’t his biological father.
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“You know, I can’t go back and ask my father that raised me, ‘Did you know?’ It’s so many unanswered questions, and it just beats you up,” Jon says in a preview clip exclusively on Billboard. “And then you go through an array of emotions, of anger to frustration to sadness to doubt to … you don’t — it’s just everything you go through, and it’s just like your life is not what you thought your life is. And then it’s also like, well, what would my life have been like if I did know my other father? What would he have taught me? Or what would I have learned?”
He also spoke on losing his 27-year-old son, Nathan Smith, in an accidental drowning this past February while he was in the middle of writing this book and how his almost 2-year-old daughter Nahara helped numb the pain. “I didn’t realize I was gonna go through life-changing things while I was writing this book, like the loss of my son,” he said. “So, I think it was all divine timing with this book happening because these stories needed to be told.
“It’s been rough,” he added. “It’s been hard. It’s a bunch of things that have helped me get through it, like my daughter. You know, my daughter is almost 2 years old now, and, you know, having part of me ripped out of my chest, she was able to help to repair some of that. When I was cold, she was able to warm me up with her love.”
Nightline airs at 12:35 a.m. ET on ABC with episodes available to stream the next day on Disney+ and Hulu.
You can watch the clip below.