Drake has revealed that he regrets name-dropping his exes in his music, especially after one of the women made him think about how the shout-outs impacted them.
After reflecting on when he might retire during a recent chat with Lil Yachty, the conversation turned to Drake’s 2016 song “Weston Road Flows,” on which he suggested that he would retire at 35.
“I hate hearing that shit,” Drizzy said of what he now considers to be an ageist statement. “I heard it the other night. I think that and some times when I’ve said girls’ names in songs, maybe those are the two things that I look back on and I’m like, ‘Maybe I coulda done without, like, shitting on people for age or disrupting somebody’s life.’”
He continued: “The lyrics are never with ill intent, but I had somebody tell me one time, ‘You know, it’s not necessarily what you’re saying about me, it’s the fact that you said it.’”
Asked to expound on that concept, Drake explained that the conversation with his ex led him to think about what else might be happening in a former lover’s life when he decides to share details about their former fling in his music.
“Just in the sense like, ‘You don’t know what it does to me,’” he added. “‘You don’t know who my boyfriend is at the time or you don’t know what my family knows or doesn’t know. And if you express any form of discontent for me and call me by name in a song, then all of a sudden I’m left to pick up the pieces of my own life that I’ve tried to build up for myself.’”
He continued: “So I’ve tried my best to stop doing that. But I like to be honest in music too, so that one’s a push and pull.”
While this is the first time Drake has addressed his misgivings about pouring so much of his personal life into his music, the topic of his retirement has been in the air of late.
The OVO hitmaker joined an episode of Nicki Minaj’s Queen Radio in August 2022 where he said he wasn’t ready to hang up the mic just yet.
“I’m not at that point where I even consider that being an option,” Drake explained to Nicki. “One of the best feelings I have in my life is completing a song or project. And by the way, those things are painful as well. A lot of nerves, a lot of confidence wavering.
“But I feel like I’m reaching a new level of fun,” he added. “I’ve reached a new level of comfortability where I want to try things. Like this last album, I put out something I wanted to do to challenge myself.”
Based on his recent output, it doesn’t appear as if Drake’s slowing down any time soon. He unleashed a pair of projects in 2022 with the house-leaning Honestly, Nevermind and 21 Savage for Her Loss collaboration with 21 Savage, both of which debuted atop the Billboard 200.
Following the release of the former last June, Drake revealed he’s readying a fourth Scary Hours EP.
“I got another Scary Hours pack coming too in a little bit,” he said on his Sound42 SiriusXM radio show Table For One. “Maybe not right now [laughs]. I need you to just take this in right now, but I have a Scary Hours. I’ma slap some headtops off with this Scary Hours pack.”
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