September 11, 2001 was a day that Fabolous always dreamed of, but shortly after the Brooklyn rapper rose from bed on that horrific morning, the dream quickly turned into a nightmare.

The 23-year-old MC had created a name for himself after he dropped a freestyle on DJ Clue’s former Hot 97 NYC radio show back in 1998. The stand-out verse earned him a recurring freestyle spot on Clue’s coveted mixtapes, and then a record deal with the iconic DJ’s Desert Storm Entertainment and the now-defunct Elektra Records.

Loso became celebrated as a lyricist thanks to those early freestyles. His unforgettable appearance on Lil' Mo’s R&B hit “Superwoman (Part 2)” brought in a female following. The back-handed comparisons to retired rapper-turned-pastor, Ma$e, provided the right amount of controversy. And his Nate Dogg-assisted debut single “Can’t Deny It,” was the perfect set-up.

By 2001, Loso built enough of a buzz to secure a Sept. 11 release date for his platinum-selling first album Ghetto Fabulous. Jay Z, Mariah Carey, Bob Dylan, Babyface and Slayer also dropped albums that day, yet the then-rookie managed to debut at Number 4 on the Billboard 200 chart with more than 140,000 copies sold in a week’s time.

But music became an afterthought when terrorist-hijacked planes struck New York City’s World Trade Center, and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. It was the worst domestic attack America had ever seen. The world changed in an instant.

Today, on the 15-year anniversary of Ghetto Fabolous and the 9/11 attacks, Loso revisits the day with Genius, in his own words.

I remember that morning I woke up and got a phone call saying that all of our promo plans for the album were cancelled and I didn’t know why. Jay Z dropped The Blueprint album the same day, so I was like, “Ahhh Jay Z sabotaged us.” But it was the 9/11 tragedy.

The first plane hit and they thought it was a mistake—maybe a plane was flying to low or lost control. We didn’t know it was a terrorist attack and then the second plane hit and it was like, “Oh OK. This is a terrorist attack.”

This was my first album, something that I was really excited about. It’s all you think about. But after I saw what was going on in the world and in New York City, I put my baby on the back burner.

That just changed everything, now we’re worrying about our safety, our families’ safety, the safety of the world, the safety of the United States. So I was confused at first. My focus wasn’t on the album. It would’ve been almost disrespectful to turn around and try to focus on promoting your album when you still had this horrible situation. All of the media that was reaching out was trying to get my thoughts on what happened with 9/11 more so than a response for the album.

I noticed that my music video for “Can’t Deny It” started to get even more play after 9/11. We didn’t purposely do the stars and stripes and red-white-and-blue color scheme in the video. It was a weird coincidence that the country needed to see something patriotic and uplifting.

We ended up having the number one video at MTV when the stats came back. They pushed that forward on their own. They wanted that video to be number one because of what it symbolized and what it showed visually. In tragic times people need something to comfort them. So they find some kind of entertainment to hold on to.

As far as recording the actual album, I was very young and didn’t know exactly what an album was supposed to sound like. That’s where Clue and my producer Duro and the influences that were around me from the Roc-A-Fella days—that’s where they all came in.

My thing was just freestyles, so the structure of an album was a little foreign to me. But I knew that I had a following from the mixtape circuit and I was trying to bring them over to the album.

Lyrically, the rhymes on Ghetto Fab were set up for each rhyme to outdo the last one because I came from that freestyle, mixtape culture. My focus was coming up with those lines to get a reaction from the people. I brought that into my songwriting when I made tracks like “Can’t Deny It” and “Keepin’ It Gangsta”. That was my initial agenda. I was a guy who was known for his lines.

People would compare me to Ma$e at the time, so on “We Don’t Give A” I said, “OK, I rap a little faster / But do I really sound like I turned from a rapper to a pastor.” That was me trying to say that Ma$e and I were two different people.

Our tones might be close, but if you look at the art itself, we’re in two different boats. When you first come out and you’re new, they try to really associate you with who you sound like. I wasn’t upset, I kinda understood it. I felt like I did my own thing and over time it got proven. I heard the comparisons less and less as my career moved on.

My favorite song on Ghetto Fabolous is “One Day.” I was trying to tell my story. With this one, I gave a little bit of metaphors, but I actually gave you what was going with me and how I grew up. On the hook, I’m giving you scenarios of what happened with my mom and something that she would tell me.

When I was writing my first album, I didn’t think we’d be talking about this 15 years later. To be completely honest, hip-hop wasn’t advanced as it is now. There was nobody really around for 15 years back in 2001—nobody that we were really still talking about. I wasn’t thinking that my career could be this long. Maybe if I did my project would’ve been a lot different.

Ghetto Fabolous will always have a special place for me because it’s my baby from when I was a baby. It’s a special project to me because I know how I felt and what I was going through at that time, but I also know how much I didn’t know. I look back at what I made then, not knowing 90 percent of what I know now about the hip-hop game, the industry and making music.

It was complete innocence. Being ignorant to things provides an innocence. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, I just did what was natural to me at that time.