From the roof of his $7 million home near Griffith Park, William “will.i.am” Adams can see the building where he grew up. It is less than 20 miles back to the gang-ridden streets of South Central Los Angeles from this eyrie in the Hollywood Hills, but the journey by the Black Eyed Peas leader has taken a decade to complete, and routed the rapper around the world.

Sitting under a tree in his terraced garden late on a July night, Adams, now 32, is dapper in his trademark crazy golfer chic – tweed cap, waistcoat and rainbow-coloured trainers. We’re here to talk about Songs About Girls, his forthcoming solo album, but spend some time tackling the rough ride that the brazenly populist Peas get from the main-stream press.

Until 2003, critics had been generally favourable towards the bohemian, reliably uncommercial rap group. Then the band drafted in the female singer Fergie and had the temerity to start having hits: their third album, Elephunk, went super-nova thanks to the antiwar hit single Where is the Love?, and their apparent parallel career as irritants began. It doesn’t seem to bother Adams particularly, as one might expect from someone whose sales figures make it easy to ignore the carping critics.

“If I was a journalist and I knew the Black Eyed Peas when they first came out and where they are now, I would write some of the same things too,” he says. “The way things were marketed didn’t honour how it was built. But we weren’t trying to make hits when we made Elephunk. You think I would have called the CIA terrorists [as he did in Where is the Love?] right around the time America went to Iraq if I was trying to make a record to get played on the radio?”

Asked about his ambitions at the start of the band, he says that his dream was to be able to buy his mother a home away from the ghettos of South Central.He accomplished that goal years ago.“Today,” he says, “I’m focused on music and the stage, and technology – connecting with our fans and giving them tools to connect with us.”

A self-confessed “geek”, Adams discovered the power of the internet the hard way. “When we first started Black Eyed Peas, we thought, ‘Let’s play colleges’,” he explains, “because those kids are going to graduate and go into the world, and if enough of them take us with them, eventually we can get a record deal. That plan worked. But in 2000 we were partying in a college dorm room and some girls were playing our second album two or three months before it came out. I was like: ‘How’d you get this s***?’ So this girl shows me Napster, and all of it was on there. After that we started playing bigger venues, but sold less records. That really opened my eyes. Now blackeyedpeas.com has more unique users than Inter-scope [the Peas label, and home to stars including 50 Cent, Beck and Gwen Stefani] has with all their artists combined.”

The most intriguing of the new tools he has been working on is a web-based music player that will turn Songs About Girls into an infinitely expandable collection of songs, and allow fans to share the profits. Developed by Adams and a company called Musicane, the player can be placed on fan web-sites, blogs or MySpace pages. Visitors can listen, but will also be able to buy the tracks, with a percentage being kept by the site hosting the player; Adams can also add new songs to the player as he wishes.

“I thought, ‘If I have an album filled with songs about girls, what happens if tomorrow I write another song about a girl?’ ” he explains. “So something that started off just with 15 songs, in the next ten years could have 100 songs. Having 12 songs on a record? That day is done.”

Adams talks with shyness yet considerable candour about the seven-year relationship that fuelled most of Songs About Girls – and about how he has reassured his current girlfriend that its unfolding tale of temporary break-ups and mutual infidelities is not anything that she need worry about. But those hundred new songs will surely be a product of both his life lessons and his hardware fetish. He recently installed recording equipment in almost every room in his house so that he never need stop working. “It’s not really a house,” he says, “it’s a studio. There are microphones and places I can plug in everywhere; a wireless controller, so I can record from anywhere; and I can log on from anywhere in the world, so even if I’m in London or Tokyo, I can still be making music.”

His work ethic is beyond prolific. He is following Songs About Girls with two more solo albums, the first a selection of duets with Alist rap stars which will be given away free with a range of clothes he is launching next March (he is a graduate of the Los Angeles Fashion Institute), the other a disc of political material called Songs about the World. A fifth Peas LP is also due towards the end of next year. And then there’s his outside production work, with Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston among the latest additions to an already bulging CV. Of Jackson’s next record, he says: “His voice is still incredible. It’s not about crazy beats that are going be here today and gone tomorrow, but melodies that will stay for a lifetime.”

Despite all the balancing acts, it certainly looks like fun to live in will’s world. As well as the money, the house and the gadgets (he’s looking forward to being among the first owners of a Tesla Roadster, an electric sports car), there’s the incident-packed existence, which gives him a fund of stories he delights in telling.

He speaks in fits and starts, suggesting someone who has perhaps learnt to control a stammer; yet he is a born raconteur, and a decent mimic, doing more than passable impersonations of Prince and Michael Jackson as he tells a tale about jamming with Prince in Vegas, only for “Mike” to ring him up to get on the guest list. A helicopter ride from Sting’s Wiltshire estate to the Glastonbury Festival was “like a movie: to this day, it doesn’t seem real”.

It is the mark of the man, and testament, perhaps, to how short that distance really is back to where he came from, that he tells these tales with the wide-eyed glee of someone struggling to accept that they really happened. Critics who laud “dark” or “edgy” art over brighter, lighter work may never fully grasp why his music is so relentlessly sunny, or so hugely popular.

“I’m the farthest from a gangsta rapper ever on the planet,” he concludes, casting a metaphorical glance back towards his birthplace as he outlines the philosophy that underpins his home, his lifestyle and his creativity. “I come from the projects, but I chose to go thisroute. I don’t wanna remember the s*** I saw, I don’t wanna talk about my friends that got shot: I wanna do music that makes me happy. Dark music gives me anxiety. I get scared! That’s why Black Eyed Peas’ s*** is happy, because I can get inside it and feel comfortable. I can escape from the world and go and live in the music.”

The single Got it from my Mama is released on September 17 taken from the album Songs About Girls, released on September 24, www.will-i-am.com

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