Release Date: Feb 4, 2022
Genre(s): Rap
Record label: Saba Pivot
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We are more than one thing all at the same time. Few Good Things is a vibrant, technicolour celebration of life's triumphs and joys. Few Good Things is a heartbroken, shattered meditation on the things we lose and how we lose them. That both of these things are true and neither contradicts the other is a testament to the tonal tightrope Chicago's finest is able to walk.
Saba's clear love for rapping, and rap music in general, is felt in his therapeutic, diaristic writing. 2018's Care For Me was filled with brutally honest moments in which Saba admitted to being overwhelmed with his own life, distraught with grief after the passing of his cousin, fellow Pivot Gang member John Walt. It's a heartbreaking debut that introduced one of the most impressive MCs of his generation to the world, and made listeners deeply invested in his life and his art. Those themes of stress and uncertainty carry over to Few Good Things, but in a different context.
When Saba released his opus CARE FOR ME in 2018, his world was shrouded in darkness and death. The fatal stabbing of his cousin a year prior, founding Pivot Gang member Walter Long Jr. aka dinnerwithjohn, left him and his loved ones stricken with loss, casting a shadow over the album's themes and tones. The hyper-focus on the loneliness of the grieving process, marked primarily by Baroque-esque, melancholic pianos and poetic memorials that pierce the soul of the most emotionless listener, turned CARE FOR ME into a time capsule of grief and existential crisis.
Chicago rapper Saba returns with his third album, 'Few Good Things', a continuation of his quest to build a personal philosophy from a life overflowing with losses and wins in equal measure. Three years after Care For Me, a mournful response to the death of John Walt, Saba's cousin and musical partner, Saba found the time and space to attempt something new on 'Few Good Things', a musically and philosophically distinct meditation on success and failure. On Come My Way, Saba matches his flow to his feelings, sprinting through childhood memories during the verses and dragging out his dreams of getting rich in the choruses.
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