The one thing Drake regrets about his ‘Thank Me Later’ album
With his debut album, Thank Me Later, Drake placed himself firmly on the map. Released in the summer of 2010, this is the moment that he announced himself as a true superstar in the making.
Drake had already developed a big reputation in the run-up to the release of Thank Me Later. Through a sequence of mixtapes and EP releases, he had laid out his stall as a rapper, and enough people had taken note. Even before his debut album, he had developed a dedicated fanbase and secured a couple of Grammy nominations.
There was, then, a buzz surrounding the impending release of his debut album, which didn’t disappoint when it eventually dropped on June 15th, 2010, and went straight to number one on both American and his native Canadian charts. When the album picked up a Grammy nomination, it was unquestionably deemed a big success.
But, as is natural enough for an artist who has since moved on to bigger and better things, Drake looks back on Thank Me Later with a certain amount of regret. He appreciates it as a stepping stone for the success that would come to him down the line, but, all the same, there are parts of it that he doesn’t entirely stand by now.
Appearing on TIDAL’s Rap Radar podcast in 2019, he broke down what, specifically, his problem with Thank Me Later is. Given where he was at that point in his career, which is to say, on the rise, he felt a lot of pressure to act the part of a famous pop star. That, he feels, ultimately damaged the album in the end.
Thank Me Later includes an impressive roster of guest stars, including Alicia Keys, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne and Jay-Z, a notable list, especially considering this was Drake’s debut album, but he feels that he may have leaned into the star power a bit too much. He leveraged those big names as a way to show off how well he was doing at that time.
“I think I felt a lot of pressure to prove that I knew big, famous people,” he admitted, “Just being from where I was from and stuff. I just wanted to show Toronto like, ‘Look who I got on my album’”.
Drake, perhaps, had a complex during that early stage of his career about not being from one of hip-hop’s traditional centres in the US. He wasn’t from New York or Los Angeles, but, even so, he was able to attract these heavy-hitters onto his debut album, so he wanted to show that fact off just a little bit too much.
“I still love it as part of my story,” he said, “But it was definitely probably the one project that maybe had the least personal touches. It was really kind of about, ‘How big can we look?’”