Twelve. Twelve out of the twenty-three songs in Drake’s new album “For All The Dogs” featured an artist singing their own verse, and to me, those are the best parts of the whole album. I might not be a huge music lover, but I could tell that these artists, including 21 Savage, J. Cole and Yeat, absolutely carried some of these songs and most of this album.

My personal favorite song in this album was “Calling For You” which featured 21 Savage. I honestly only liked the last minute or two of the song where 21 Savage rapped. It flowed well and had a powerful sound behind the lyrics, which contrasted Drake’s first minute and a half, which was very boring and frankly sounded like the rest of the album.

I’ve never really enjoyed listening to Drake. There are a few of his songs here and there that I enjoyed; however, nothing in this album particularly stood out to me. Nothing sounded like it could become one of the top songs in the world. In fact, I was actually relieved when another artist came onto the song. I needed a break from Drake’s voice.

The most popular song on the new album is “IDGAF,” featuring experimental rapper Yeat. This song might not be considered that popular because of its extensive length, which was over four minutes, but just a few lyrics in, where Drake abruptly interrupts Yeat’s portion of the song, the entire mood of the song changes.  It transitions from a serious and deep tone to something high-pitched and pretty funny. 

In terms of a fan base, this album showed no serious gain in popularity for Drake, but possibly a loss of fans because of its mediocrity. Another reason for a lot of the mediocrity within the album is the first thing you see when going to listen to it, the album cover. The cover, a dog drawn by Drake’s six-year-old son, was obviously nothing incredible. I think it got the job done but still, the cover was very simple, a little boring and probably could have been touched up a bit.

This isn’t an album I can lay down and listen to for the original duration of one hour and twenty-five minutes. I had to split my listening in half as I got tired of it very quickly and felt like all these similar songs were seemingly never-ending. 

This album was the longest of Drake’s career, in terms of the number of songs and duration; he could have done better to improve the quality of the songs instead of the quantity. By doing this, he could have focused on bettering the flow of the lyrics, and developing on the little things that people enjoy, like the background and tone of the song.

This was possibly the first album Drake had ever produced without a song blowing up. It was obviously just recently released, but genuinely, I don’t see any potential for the album. I think Drake might have tried too hard, almost forcing a great album by featuring the hottest new artists in the world right now. I think some of the best songs come from artist collaborations, however, great things come with time, and Drake could have used much more of it to create the album. There is no need to hurry something up if it is not done correctly.