Cee Lo Green has kept mostly quiet since he put his foot in his mouth repeatedly on Twitter last year following a no contest plea to drugging a woman with ecstasy in 2012. First he Tweeted out an unforgivable rant about what constitutes rape following the case going public, shortly after he offered a not-quite apology, and then his planned TBS reality show called The Good Life was canceled amidst the controversy.
Despite the public silence though, Green has apparently been working on an album called Heart Blanche slated for release later this year. "It's arguably the best piece of work he's ever done," Cee Lo's manager told Billboard in an interview published today. "It's very rare to find artists these days that focus on an album as a body of work—most albums these days are just collections of songs, but that's not the case here."
"We're actually in the final stages of completing his album," Atlantic Records CEO, Craig Kallman, said. "He's really been hard at work. We've got a big, big list of songs that we've been going through, and we're kind of mixing the final songs now. We're going to be imminently figuring out his marketing plan and single release schedule, and we're looking at the fourth quarter [for release]."
The announcement came with news about a separate album from Green that was prematurely released in January on Soundcloud and promptly deleted. "Actually somebody inadvertently posted the project before it was supposed to come out," Green's manager said of the record, TV on the Radio, "So we had to have it pulled down. It got critical acclaim during the short period of time it was up, amazing reviews, but it wasn't time for it to be released—the plan is for it to follow Heart Blanche. And frankly, not everything was cleared, but that's different now."
