Charles Hamilton back?

That September, [Interscope] released him. Hamilton says no one even bothered telling him. “I was at a girlfriend’s house,” he recalls. “She was online on her computer, and said, ‘Charles, you got dropped.’ I was like, ‘Oh my God.'”

Hamilton retreated from the public eye, his life in a tailspin. “I locked myself in my house with the lights out and a turntable turning with no record on it,” he says. “I was depressed, paranoid and confused.”

In 2010, his mother discovered that he was living in an abandoned building in Staten Island and telling friends he was going to jump off Macomb’s Dam Bridge in Harlem. At one point, Hamilton says he tried to overdose on lithium. “I thought my son was going to die,” says Moorer. “He didn’t look like my child. He looked like an alien. He was just not there.”