Scrolling SoundCloud the other week, I was reminded of the Blackberry arguments, email apologies, and voicemail serenades of the Heartbreak Drake era. Technically, that’s the name of the unofficial compilation mixtape series I had downloaded onto my old iPod, but I consider Heartbreak Drake the brief moment in time right before and after So Far Gone, where a bunch of Drake’s grainy R&B loosies, unfinished scraps, and remixes were floating around rap blogs. The moody emotional dumps were ridiculously petty yet sincere situational melodramas that felt so raw and impulsive, like they were recorded seconds after some shit went down.
Listening to them today, it’s hard to get over the fact that they’re full of ideas that—through a combination of age, insecurities, and public embarrassments—would eventually harden into incel balladry. At the time, though, they felt like the purest form of an overly sensitive guy in his early 20s stumbling through dating life while also trying hard as hell to get famous enough so that every woman and her man would respect him.
What I love most about this era is his Sirkian, conversational writing style that aspired to capture Static Major’s attention to detail, Aaliyah and Brandy’s personal nuance, and Trey Songz and J. Holiday’s playboy bravado all at once. On “Something,” he falls over a woman he just met uncomfortably hard, as Noah “40” Shebib’s drums throb like a heart ready to burst. After a breakup on “Stunt On You,” he goes on an obsessive downward spiral, driving up and down the street of his ex late at night, hoping that he can flex his new car on her. In a creaky melody on “Messages From You,” he damn-near wants to perform the mind-erasing procedure from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on himself, so he can move on from the old girl blowing up his phone to the new girl that might be the one: “I was caught up in these drinks they keep on making/An amazing conversation/With this girl named Lorraine, who says she’s from L.A./And keeps makin’ me laugh and even asks if she can pay.” The indecision makes him go full Z-Ro by the end—you know he was always a Houston boy deep down.
