It’s Never Enough: Drake‘s R&B mixtape that never saw the light of day
In the early parts of Fall 2010, Drake was coming off a hot summer, having just released his debut studio album, Thank Me Later. The Canadian, soon-to-be superstar wasn’t done with releasing music. In fact, he was slated to drop a mixtape — an R&B mixtape — titled It’s Never Enough.
The first track released for the tape was “I Get Lonely Too,” a slowed-up tempo song produced by Noah “40” Shebib. The song takes many pages from TLC‘s 1999 track, “FanMail.” According to a 2010 MTV article, a 23-year-old Drake announced ‘I Get Lonely Too” was Drake’s favorite from the tape. He had planned on putting it out in October but pushed the release for later that year.
Related content: Drake recorded “The Motto” verse in one take
“I don’t know if it’ll be this month,” Drake said to MTV, at the time of anticipation. It’s a lot of great music that we all enjoy listening to as a team. Gearing up for my next album, preparing people. What I said on my next album is that I didn’t necessarily wanna have full R&B songs. I just wanna find a balance like I did on So Far Gone. I wanna have more songs on my next album. I wanna give people that music. I’m really excited about It’s Never Enough. I might pick a beautiful woman and shoot a video. I have some ideas.”
The R&B album never lived to see the light of day, but songs like “I Get Lonely Too” have found nesting grounds on Drake projects (Care Package), fan-made mixtapes, and the many vortexes of the internet. The following fall season, Drake dropped what has been heralded as one of his best albums, Take Care.
In 2018, Drake released his album, Scorpion. On side B of the digital double-disc album, it’s full R&B, an idea that Drake has back pocketed for nearly a decade at the time.