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 fucking 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.”
Michael Paterniti is a GQ correspondent and the author of The Telling Room, on sale July 30
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