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.”