In a piece for The NY Times, Drake talks his upbringing, how a destructive relationship spawned the singing on So Far Gone as well as his brief relationship with Rihanna:
On So Far Gone he sought to cultivate multiple audiences at once: in addition to straight-ahead rap songs, he also rapped over instrumentals from indie acts like Santigold, Lykke Li and Peter Bjorn & John. “That was supposed to be the wild and crazy project we did to get that out of our system before we put out a really generic rap album,” said Oliver el-Khatib, Drake’s longtime friend and de facto creative consultant.
Most notably, he sang — some songs in their entirety. In part that was a response to heartbreak: he’d been trying to shake loose of a destructive relationship with a manipulative woman who had taunted him with the fact that she had previously been involved with a famous rap star. The wounded R&B songs are about her. “I don’t even know if I wrote a rap song in that whole nine months,” Drake said, “because I wasn’t a rapper anymore. I didn’t believe in myself. I was someone else’s property.”
On “Fireworks” there’s a verse about Rihanna, who asked him last year to write a song for her new album; the two soon began seeing each other regularly, though they never publicly confirmed their brief relationship. “I was a pawn,” Drake said. The song he wrote for her never got released. “You know what she was doing to me? She was doing exactly what I’ve done to so many women throughout my life, which is show them quality time, then disappear,” he said. “I was like, wow, this feels terrible.”
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