Last year treated up-and-coming rapper Nick Grant rather well. He dropped his ’88 mixtape, made his SXSW debut, and hit the road with Dave East for the ‘Hate Me Now’ Tour.

Now, just a few weeks into 2017, Nick Grant has released Return of The Cool (January 13) with features from the Grammy-nominated BJ the Chicago Kid and Watch The Duck. And yesterday, he sat with Rap Radar to discuss his performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, chopping it up with his idols, and his upcoming album Sunday Dinner.

On his MLK Day performance on Colbert:

“I just felt like it was something needed. Everybody wants to do the hit record of course so, for me, I wanted to make it special being that it was his day and just came up with something really quick and just wanted to perform that [original piece] ‘Love.’”

On meeting Heavy D:

“Like a month before he passed away we had, like, an hour conversation. It was at the BET Awards when he performed and I had saw him in Atlanta at this pizza place called Fellini’s, one of my favorite places in the city. Saw him in there and met him. Saw him again; he was like, ‘What’s going on?’ We had, like, an hour talk just about hip hop, just hip-hop conversations, and the last thing he said to me was like, ‘Yo, treat every opportunity like it’s your last opportunity, treat every rhyme like it’s your last rhyme.’ And I said that in another Sway verse: ‘Was conversing with Heavy before he passed / he told me write every rhyme like it’s my last.’

On upcoming debut album Sunday Dinner:

“Return of the Cool was supposed to be a mixtape just to put out, just to gear up for the next body of work. My first project and my first official album should be titled Sunday Dinner because it talks about my life and everything that’ve been through and I want to get more personal within the music. So I chose the title Sunday Dinner because [the] only time I really saw my family was like cookouts, funerals, and Sunday dinner, but Sunday dinner being the most intimate and you had all these different personalities… And you got all these people around the table and you just sitting at the end, just looking at them, and they help make you who you are in a sense. Every person and every experience with that person becomes a record, therefore, Sunday Dinner.”

Listen to Return of the Cool below:

And catch Nick Grant out this summer at Broccoli City Fest.