Best I Ever Had

The harmony on 'Best I Ever Had' is deliberately thin — a looped bass riff from a 1975 soft rock record provides a warm, repetitive harmonic bed at 107 BPM. Boi-1da described the production goal as 'emotional,' and the restraint delivers exactly that: by keeping the harmonic palette spare, the sentiment in Drake's lyrics, especially the chorus ('sweat pants, hair tied, chilling with no makeup on'), carries without competition. For a track that reached #2 on the Hot 100, that economy of means is the point.

Drake wrote 'Best I Ever Had' for So Far Gone at the direction of Lil Wayne's management while touring with Wayne. Producer Boi-1da assembled the beat between December 2008 and January 2009 while living with his parents, after a friend sent him a folder of old-school samples. He found 'Fallin' in Love' by Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds, latched onto its bass riff — describing it as 'very smooth' and 'a quicker tempo than a lot of the stuff I do' — and built the entire beat in about 20 minutes. He sent it to Drake the next day; Drake recorded the vocals and finished the track within hours.

Released as a free digital download in February 2009, 'Best I Ever Had' transformed Drake from a Toronto rap prospect into a mainstream force almost overnight. Boi-1da built the beat in roughly 20 minutes around a bass riff sampled from a 1975 Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds track, and Drake finished the vocals within hours. The single peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Drake's first top-ten hit in the United States and establishing the melodic rap-singing hybrid that would define his career.