“It’s harder to love myself when all these people compliment me,” he raps, conflicted. “FIGHTER” is submerged and glassy, its watery sheen glistening like it’s catching sunlight Saba surfaces from this shimmer as if cresting in a wave pool. The instrumentation is bracing, almost as if played live for a crowd, but it has the intimate tenor and tone of Saba recording the entire thing alone in his basement. Each note and phrase on the album is colored to depict this struggle. Saba hasn’t lost his faith, but his patience is running thin. So much of CARE FOR ME is an ongoing conversation trying to reconcile a cruel, unforgiving world with God’s plan. He sees his reflection in these remembrances and confronts his own mortality, but in the process he finds something divine. His voice can sway from muted and understated to insistent in an instant he subtly shifts from conversational to explanatory whenever the mood calls for it, but never at the expense of the narrative flow. (At one point, Saba waxes nostalgically about a time before insomnia, sleeping peacefully and living sober and college-bound, harkening back to a childlike innocence.) The 23-year-old’s fleet, singsongy raps bend and tuck into his largely piano-centric arrangements, which build sets for the scenarios he’s reliving. A choice few attempt to capture something more ephemeral: the fleeting feeling of being safe, being comfortable and well-adjusted. Songs reveal themselves to be mementos of transformational moments in his life. Through carefully collected and arranged memory fragments-some clear and focused, some concealed and disorienting-Saba considers what it means now for his cousin’s dreams to go forever unrealized.Ĭomposed entirely by Saba with producer DaedaePivot and multi-instrumentalist Daoud, CARE FOR ME is meticulously structured, orchestrated, and arrayed. With a Walter-sized hole in Saba’s life, reassesses that optimism. It was a sonic wishing well of sorts, a hopeful album of unfulfilled dreams and limitless potential. That album challenged listeners to see their ambitions through because time was of the essence. Given the context under which CARE FOR ME was made, Saba’s 2016 debut, Bucket List Project, feels almost prescient. “They want a barcode on my wrist/To auction off the kids that don’t fit their description of a utopia (black)/Like a problem won’t exist if I just don’t exist,” he raps before nose-diving into a more pervasive existential crisis: “Life don’t mean shit to a nigga that ain’t never had shit.”
“LIFE” uses personal dread as a lens through which to examine the rat race that is trying to survive. His writing carries within it an empathic power, the sensation of peering into a photograph so long it conjures the textures of a memory. He seeks solace for his audience as much as he seeks it for himself. The songs are cathartic, yes, but they are also engaging. “Carefully editing every word, everything got to be charity/Give it my all, these melodies therapy,” he raps on “GREY,” a kind of subtitle for the all-caps plea of the album’s name. Through this inner turmoil, he finds his most powerful and diaristic storytelling. Saba attempts to grapple with his ongoing depression as he wonders aloud if he’s really the only one. The album, in turn, bears out the exhaustion that comes with simply processing. “I’m tryna cope, but it’s a part of me gone and, apparently, I’m alone.”ĬARE FOR ME processes grief and its attendant loneliness, the paradox of feeling secluded during the most connected era in history, and having to manage that misery inside the social gratification matrix-the machine of hearts, smileys, and dopamine hits. “Jesus got killed for our sins, Walter got killed for a coat,” he raps. Saba’s gorgeous, meditative new album, CARE FOR ME, begins with him singing the words “I’m so alone.” Isolation and trauma go hand-in-hand when you lose someone close, especially when that someone served as your shield for so long. Reality has a way of knocking that right out of you. To be young is often to be fixated on your own presumed indestructibility. He was Saba’s mentor, his wingman, dauntless and deathless until, suddenly, he wasn’t.
The way Saba raps about his cousin-born Walter Long Jr., who performed as dinnerwithjohn and was a founding member of Saba’s Pivot Gang crew-you’d think he was magical, kissed by fortune his entire life. The killer tailed him for half a block before fleeing, just to make sure he would die. Last year, Saba’s cousin was stabbed to death in Chicago after a brief scuffle on the train.
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