Used To

Featuring Lil Wayne over a production that bridges their two eras with surprising elegance, "Used To" builds its emotional architecture around the grammar of contrast — what was, what is, who remained, who disappeared. The beat carries a cinematic quality, strings suggesting retrospective distance, the bass sitting beneath like time passing underfoot. Drake's delivery here has the particular texture of earned sentiment, the nostalgia authenticated by specificity: not generalized longing but the naming of particular people and places and moments when the future was still unknown. Wayne's verse arrives like a cameo from an earlier chapter, the mentor and the student briefly occupying the same frame, their different relationships to struggle and success creating productive tension. Lyrically the track interrogates loyalty with notable precision — who was present before success made presence advantageous, who used proximity as currency. The cultural weight is significant: this is Drake in full accounting mode, documenting the human cost of ascent. Toronto specificity anchors the universality. The listening scenario has a driving quality — highway at dusk, the skyline behind you, the destination still ahead. A song for the period of reflection that follows major transitions, when you're far enough from the beginning to see it clearly but not so far that it doesn't still ache occasionally. Gratitude and grief occupying the same emotional space.