We expect a Drake album, and so Drake provides an album. We expect Drake to address the child, and so he throws a line about the child into a song unfurling a scroll of complaints with the world. Still, much like the rest of the album itself, it felt like a tedious necessity - something Drake the artist himself didn’t want to do, but felt he had to. It was a safe and acceptable moment: He was able to address the elephant in the room in a way that seemed reasonable, in a way that only the most cynical listener would push back against. “I wasn't hidin' my kid from the world / I was hidin' the world from my kid,” Drake raps, sandwiched between fist-shaking bars about how young people are always on their phones and posting on Instagram. But it made sense to me that one of the biggest artists in the world - especially one who staked his early career on tearing down the walls of privacy - might want to keep a high-stakes situation like unexpected fatherhood private.ĭrake addresses this in somewhat predictable fashion on “Emotionless,” the fourth track on the sprawling 90-minute album Scorpion, released last Friday. With “The Story of Adidon,” Pusha T placed Drake in a corner and the only way out was through explanation. Outside of the humor and bewilderment it produced from people on the internet, whether or not Drake had a child - or whether or not he wanted everyone to know about him - was never particularly interesting to me. But fittingly, the plodding and emotionally monochromatic Views eclipsed the cover altogether, hinting at the loss of intimacy to come. “These Days” is the perfect song to bring the second act of his career to a close, the act when he went from mixtape darling and promising newcomer to legitimate star with the world at his feet and the expectations that go along with that.
Drake’s version, like the original, is melancholy and sparse, ruminating on loneliness and regret, looking back on a life that was different from his current one. But I found myself interested because his cover felt like an honest, genuinely personal offering from an artist who seemed to be losing touch with the brand of intimacy that once grounded him. It didn’t help that to some who heard it, the cover was not considered good - a song far out of Drake’s comfort zone and vocal familiarity. Drake’s version leaked online the same day as an early cut of future Views single “Controlla” hit the web, which overshadowed the cover. “These Days” was written by Jackson Browne at 16, published in 1967, and made popular in that same year by the German singer Nico, when she recorded it for her album Chelsea Girl. A forgotten song in the avalanche of music released by Drake in 2016 is a one-off cover of “These Days.” It came out in early spring, weeks before the release of Views, his exhausting and long-anticipated fourth studio album.
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