Ever since Illmatic, his classic 1994 debut, Nas has been hailed as the "greatest rapper alive", but the 38-year-old hasn't always enjoyed the best of times. On a blustery afternoon in London, wearing shades in a windowless hotel boardroom, he's prepared to weather whatever else the world has to throw at him. "Just so much happening, and me getting older," he says. "I mean I love getting older, but it's just a lot of responsibility, a lot of things on top of each other.
"I was seeing a lot of hypocrisy in the music industry, and seeing the world in such a bad place economically," he continues. "Meanwhile, I'm supposed to love Barack Obama being a black man as president. I'm glad I lived to see it – the flipside is, after we get over that, it's back to the politics, and it's something which doesn't have time for people, it's its own animal ..."
Then there are his specific troubles. "I ran into tax problems that really caught me off-guard," he says, referencing an ongoing run-in with the US Internal Revenue Service over a $6.5m (£4.1m) unpaid bill. "I was screwed over, and at the same time I had a very public divorce, with a young son I wasn't able to see."
In 2009, he filed to end his four-year marriage to Kelis, the R&B star, just months before the birth of their son, Knight Jones. He always brought an acute sense of self-awareness to his celebrated spats with rival Jay-Z in the early noughties, and age and maturity are recurring themes on his new album, Life Is Good. But the provocative cover artwork suggests a more youthful desire for attention. The image shows a forlorn Nas, clad in an immaculate white suit, alone in a club VIP lounge, his former wife's green wedding dress draped over his knee. Their split was followed by a year of expensive wrangling over support and legal fees.
If your dirty laundry is going to be aired in public whether you like it or not, you may as well take it to its logical conclusion and put the laundry on your album cover, I suggest. Did you see the dress in your wardrobe and think "that's going on the album cover"?
"I found it in my house and thought, it's going somewhere! Either on the cover of my album, or burning in a garbage can." He laughs. "I was angry when I first found it. Hurt and angry – but I don't think she left it deliberately to hurt me. It's just part of the dress, so I don't know where the rest of it is. But it made all the sense in the world for me to ... hold on to that." He pauses. "I guess that's just my personality.
"My wedding and my marriage was, for the most part, some of the most amazing times of my life." He clears his throat. "She's an incredible woman. It just ended really publicly, it seemed real bad. I guess this is my Here, My Dear album, that Marvin Gaye made. It might not be quite so much about the marriage or the divorce, but it's still that kind of record for me."
It's not just the last three years he's reflecting on in Life Is Good, especially now he's ridden out two decades in hip-hop, has two children, and is approaching his 40th birthday. His native Queensbridge in Queens, New York, the largest public housing project in America, looms large over the album: "fifth floor apartment in the projects", "elevators out of order", and on A Queens Story, even in the production: the epic violin sweeps could be straight out of a Broadway musical.
"It's about how I got here. An appreciation of the journey, seen in retrospect. I really love the era that I got into the rap game, and because I lived it, it was something that's been calling me. So I wanted it to feel like that 80s Queens sound, but to take it to where I am today, which is more mature."
He tried to harness that sound with the album's main producers, Salaam Remi and No ID – "but like, not too much of it," he clarifies. This was never supposed to be a retro album – with the exception of Reach Out, recorded with Mary J Blige. It's a reworking of a DJ Hot Day mastermix, a Queensbridge classic from 1987 that mixed hip-hop with New Edition. "I remember buying it from a flea market," Nas says. "When I hear Mary singing, I'm taken back to late 80s New York – to Queens, to Harlem, to the rest of the boroughs." It's funny to think that it's 25 years since the original, before hip-hop was a global phenomenon – and Nas is a touch wistful, reminiscing about local legends such as Marley Marl, MC Shan, and Roxanne Shanté. "It was storytelling, and it was super local – when you heard a record from Brooklyn, it introduced you to Brooklyn in a way nothing else could do. When hip-hop was smaller, this is how we found out about different places – and that still lives in all of us who love hip-hop."
Nonetheless, "hip-hop belongs to all of us now," he says. "I've matured, and my music is going to reflect that. I don't use words like 'bitches' as much as I used to in my daily life, but it's still in my music – music's my outlet, but it's not that mature yet. I'm not singing jazz yet, I'm not Sinatra."
Even if dwarfed by Illmatic, the new album is his strongest for several years. Among its highlights is Cherry Wine, featuring the late Amy Winehouse. On Me and Mr Jones from Back to Black, she'd sung about being pissed off at the prospect of missing a Nas gig; Salaam Remi worked on that record, and before its release in 2006, he effected an introduction. "He said: 'There's this girl, you guys are just alike, you write the same, you think alike, you share the same birthday," Nas recalls.
"She was wise way beyond her years, dude. She was too wise. Man, she would call me and I'd be laughing the entire conversation," he laughs. "We'd be talking about movies, music ... she wouldn't soften the blow when she said what she had to say, it didn't matter who she was talking about."
I remind him that the opening track on Life Is Good includes the disarming line: "I'm pushing 40, don't applaud for me, I'm exhausted." He doesn't seem exhausted. In fact, the album title's not tongue-in-cheek at all, is it? "I think if I heard someone else talking about their life, describing all the problems I've had, they'd look like they were through. Done. But there's something about me – I'm smiling. Those things are really not bad enough to put me in a slump. I'm smiling with the opportunity to wake up every morning."
He leans back in his chair and winds up the interview. "You know that saying, 'Don't run down and grab one cow, walk down and grab them all?'" I nod, lying. "I guess I'm just in a better place now."
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