Exerpt
Drake leads me out through the living room, past the grand piano and bar, and up a few stairs to the Safari Room, where 40 joins us. There's a stuffed tiger, thick curtains that remain drawn against the sunlight, Oriental rugs on the floor, and a big hookah to blow on. The studio is some padded foam on the wall, a long table with big speakers, a few computers, a small soundboard, a leather couch and chair, and that's about it. No instruments in sight, no room for groupies. "We're four songs into the new album," says Drake.
Drake handles the words and melodies; 40 cooks the beats. "At this point, I can't have anybody but 40," Drake says. "Sometimes you'll hear me screaming halfway across the house—'40! 40!' It's the euphoric feeling of having completed something. I'm ready to do it now."
40 is nodding, with a wry smile. "I get called out of bed sometimes," he says. "We can do fifteen takes, and I swear, we almost always go back to the first one. That's the one in which the emotion and flow and original thought is captured."
Drake makes no apology for the fact that what he and 40 are trying to do is make hits—consumable, genre-bending tunes that will get played on the radio, pushed into the clubs, and thump at parties. Songs that will carry the tour, making for golden moments live. "You constantly ask yourself: Will I ever be able to excite people the way I did when the Internet was going crazy, back when you first felt like you had a piece of Drake that no one else had, and you wanted to share it with your friends? Is there an album or song we can make now that's good enough to get people that excited again?
"I ain't gonna lie: I want to be the one you listen to this summer," he says.
If in the past Drake had any reservations about playing bigger venues—about being able to energetically fill those venues while yearning for the days of mixtape intimacy—those doubts have been dashed now. "I fully accept I'm an arena-touring act," says Drake. "When I'm writing, I'm thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don't translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you. That's why on this album I've been trying to condense my thoughts to sixteen-bar verses. There's something to be said for spacing out the lines, to infiltrate people's minds."
It sounds like another rap: Spacing out the lines / to infiltrate people's minds. But it goes beyond infiltration: It's intimacy that Drake really craves: "I want you to leave with the feeling that I was talking to you the whole time. If I pointed to you, you're probably right, I did point to you. I probably was talking about your friend, you know?"
Drake and 40 swivel at the same time and start tapping the keys of their laptops, cuing up the first track off of Nothing Was the Same, a song called "Tuscan Leather"—a title, Drake tells me, named for a Tom Ford fragrance that some say smells like a brick of cocaine.
The truth is I have no idea what to expect. The paradox of Drake is that he's so multiple, he might write a love song sung by an Idol contestant ("Find Your Love") or something so raunchy you can't play it for kids ("Practice"). He could be rhyming about the kingdom of his material world, and then crooning about his spiritual state. He's a mama's boy who'll cut you up, though his tough-guy posturing seems occasionally halfhearted because, after all, he seems so kind of...decent.
Now comes the music, in a sudden blast, like green light through fog, the first notes strange and dissonant, in a lurching 3/4 beat. The intro hurtles and whiplashes, and a woman's voice, as if on helium, floats through the chaos, in the highest register, sorta funny and ghostly and beautiful. (It turns out to be a Whitney Houston sample.) The sound is an evocation of something that feels nostalgic and new, exuberant and menacing, at once. Which is when Drake's voice breaks through, rapping, pumped up, spitting nails. Both inside and outside the song itself, he keeps repeating, How much time's this nikka spending on the intro? How much time's this nikka spending on the intro? It feels like bedlam.
All the while, the real Drake sits with his eyes closed across the room, moving his lips, rapping to himself rapping. There's a verse, and then an as-yet-empty spot for a guest rap, and then Drake comes back under Whitney's helium voice. This time the words shift, as does the beat, becoming more sinuous and personal. Rising underneath the music, too, is a gentler keyboard riff, and by the time the third verse ends, the song rivers into a soft, ambient landscape that includes crowd noise and then, eventually, a voice—Curtis Mayfield's, at the end of a 1987 concert in Montreux—saying, "Having the same fears, shedding similar tears, and of course dying in so many years, it don't mean that we can't have a good life."
Then it outros on that beautiful repeating keyboard riff, and the Drake in the room, eyes still closed, scrunches his face, feeling every note. When it's over, he awakes from the spell. 40 remains hunched at the computer for a moment, letting the music settle into the silence. And then they both swivel in my direction again.
I've been dreading this moment, the ritualistic playing of the new album for the magazine writer. What if I don't like it? I'm not going to fake it. Both Drake and 40 are looking at me now, curious. I hold up my arm, and thankfully my arm doesn't lie: goose bumps. Drake's face breaks into a smile, and he says, "Ah, man, I didn't expect that—but for you to hear the emotion in it is amazing to me. This is my fukking moment to say if I wanted to rap all the time, really rap, I would, but I also love to make music. I'll do this for you right now. But it's for me, too. It's my story."
That's what the moment before the Moment is about, then, for Drake. "I'm thinking about this body of work—and asking myself: Where am I at in my life, how can I sum it up, and how can I make it relatable?"
They play three more songs, remarkable for the changing beats and moods within each, for the spare, moody spaces left open for the always surprising force of Drake's introspection. When the songs end, Drake opens his eyes again, returns from some place in his mind.
"I'm trying to get back to that kid in the basement," he says. "To say what he has to say. And I'm trying to make it last."
@ Weezy. Drake is gonna bless us in August.
Cole, Wale, Kanye, Jay, and now maybe Drake.