J. Cole wrote Neighbors after his studio was raided by police

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Eric Garcia

Washington Bureau Chief

Over the weekend, Elite, a co-executive producer on J. Cole’s latest album, 4 Your Eyez Only, shared details behind the making of the 31-year-old Fayetteville rapper’s fifth studio record.

According to the album’s liner notes, Neighbors was inspired by true events. Elite recently told Complex that while Cole and his team were working on the album in a North Carolina suburb, a SWAT team raided the house he rented as a workspace.

Read the story behind "Neighbors" below and check out Elite’s full interview with Complex here.

Basically, Cole rented out a house in North Carolina. It’s not for him; it’s like a safe haven/creative workspace for all the Dreamville artists and producers. We call it the Sheltuh, and a lot of the album was recorded there.. It’s basically a studio in a basement, in the woods.

It’s also in the suburbs of a pretty wealthy neighborhood in North Carolina. So you have, predominately, African-Americans coming in and out of this house. Ubers coming, and every once in awhile you’ll see a group of us outside on the porch smoking weed. So the neighbors started getting real paranoid.

Apparently what happened was, we were all in Austin, Texas, for SXSW; thankfully no one was in the house when this went down. One of the neighbors told the police we were growing weed or selling drugs out of this house. And there was a huge investigation, like a million-dollar investigation. They flew helicopters over, sent an entire SWAT team armed with weapons, broke down the door and searched the whole house. Thankfully nobody was in the house. Our engineer Juro “Mez” Davis had just stepped out for lunch and he came back and saw the SWAT team busting down the door.

They go downstairs and all they see is a studio, and obviously they felt stupid. It’s just crazy ironic because out of anybody, they picked the wrong person. J. Cole is the last person to do anything like that. He’s out here doing extremely positive things for the community and for young artists. Because of obvious racism from the neighbors, the police were called and a raid took place.