In prison, he hadn't written a word.

"I wasn't in that state of mind," said Sigel, who's as well-respected a lyricist within rap as he is notorious outside it for his run-ins with the law, which include a 2003 attempted-murder charge. (He was acquitted.)

"I wasn't Beanie Sigel then," he says. "I was 57613-066."

When he came up with "Return of the Bad Guy," Sigel thought it would be the title track of his next album. But "Bad Guy" did not even make it onto his fourth album, which came out Tuesday. It's called "The Solution."

"I want to get off that bad-guy thing," says Sigel, 33, sitting for an interview in the control room of Studio 609, the North Philadelphia headquarters of Andre Harris and Vidal Davis, the hit-making duo whose platinum records, produced for Jill Scott, Usher and Musiq Soulchild, hang by the pool table.

Harris and Davis helmed the lion's share of the 14-song CD "The Solution" (Roc-A-Fella). That includes "The Day" and "Dear Self," soul-searching cuts that try to position the 5-foot-10, 260-pound Sigel as more than just the scowling capo on Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella Records crew. And they do it by successfully pairing Sigel with the voices of bat-eating rocker Ozzy Osbourne and fluttery-voiced sensitive man James Blunt.

Both songs are compelling because Sigel, as always, rhymes with conviction. In "What Your Life Like," from his 2000 debut album "The Reason," he painted a frightening portrait of life behind bars that was all the more impressive because, at that point, the South Philly native had never done time.

In "The Day," he takes stock and concludes, "I'm a man, and I ain't perfect, but that's no excuse," over a sample of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs." And on the even more effective "Dear Self," good Beanie lectures bad Beanie about the perils of false bravado, over Blunt's "No Bravery." "Open your ears, eyes and heart, cause the hour shall cometh/Ishmael blows his trumpet."

In an interview last week, just before a scheduled meeting with his probation officer - last year he received two years' probation for an assault conviction, for breaking a man's eye socket in 2003 - Sigel shows no signs of the snarly menace he so skillfully conveys on his CDs.

Sigel, born Dwight Grant and nicknamed Beanie by his grandmother, Margaret Grant, grew up on Sigel Street near the South Philadelphia neighborhood known as Drug Row. Today, his associates call him Beans.

Sigel says his time in prison made him a different man, a point Davis agrees with. "You can sense the change in him," the producer says. "He's gotten older, and more wise."

Going to jail "was a good thing for me at the time," Sigel says. "Just to be away. Ever since I got signed (to Roc-A-Fella) in 1998, I was just always going, going, going. I never had the chance to be normal, even for a second."

But don't get the impression that Sigel has suddenly transformed into a kindler, gentler teddy bear.

He says the songs "people need to listen to" are "The Day," "No Bravery," and other thought-provoking numbers like "Prayer" and the anti-Iraq war "Children Are the Future," which borrows from Marvin Gaye.

But "The Solution" is also full up with unexpurgated, often ultra-violent gangsta rap.

Its first single makes a bid for pop success with an R. Kelly hook as the self-proclaimed "Broad Street Bully" reintroduces himself as "a hoodlum, a monster, a bad boy, a goodfella, a gangsta and a thug."

And in "Go Low," Sigel serves up the genre at its most brutal. "Fresh over the barbed wire, it's the live wire ..." he raps, threatening to violate his enemies with a broomstick and other violence with a barrage of profanity. "Death can be your destiny child, just say my name ..."

"I have to make those songs," says Sigel, who has three children, and was jailed for an hour in November 2005 for owing $27,000 in child support. "That's what people want to hear."

"It's just like Hollywood," says the rapper, who played a gangster named Beans with plans to "take over the streets, like John Street" in the 2002 movie "State Property."

"'Scarface.' `The Godfather.' Those are the movies that's glorified. So why when I make a song they don't look at it in the same light?"

He called the album "The Solution," he says, because "it's the solution to a lot of the problems in hip-hop. ... I think hip-hop right now lacks character. You get these artists with one big song, and you listen to the album and it's just that one single."