Lauryn Hill left federal prison and headed for home a few days early. Hill was sentenced to three months for tax evasion and her start date was to be July 8, 2013. However, with a few days remaining on her sentence, the Bureau of Prisons issued Hill a “get out jail early” card for, among other things, good behavior.
After a hiatus from making albums, Hill had been back in the studio just before her stint in prison. She released a new track, “Consumerism,” Thursday to mark her release, noting that she had scrambled to put it together just before she entered prison because she felt had relevance. She posted a stream of the track on her Tumblr page, together with a brief introduction to her latest project, “Letters From Exile.” She said about her inspiration for the project:
…[i]nspiration of this sort is a kind of news in and of itself, and often times contains an urgency that precedes what happens. I couldn’t imagine it not being relevant. Messages like these I imagine find their audience, or their audience finds them, like water seeking it’s [sic] level.