Drake’s Take Care turns 15 on November 15, and the anniversary is a Toronto story first. The album was released on November 15, 2011 by Young Money, Cash Money and Republic, recorded mainly in Toronto, and it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 631,000 copies sold in its first week.
Fifteen years on, Take Care is the record that fixed the Drake sound in place: low-tempo, late-night, sung as much as rapped, built by Toronto producers in Toronto studios. This is a revisit ahead of the anniversary, not a new release, and the album has never really left. It has since been certified diamond in the United States.
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Take Care release date, label and singles
Take Care followed 2010’s Thank Me Later, a debut Drake himself considered rushed, and the title was the correction. As he explained it at the time:
That’s why my new album is called Take Care, because I get to take my time this go-round.
The album runs 80 minutes across 17 songs, with guest appearances from The Weeknd, Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Lil Wayne, André 3000, Birdman and Stevie Wonder, who also contributed to the album’s creative direction. Seven singles carried it across two years: Marvins Room, Headlines, Make Me Proud, The Motto, Take Care, HYFR and Crew Love. Four of them, Headlines, Make Me Proud, The Motto and the Rihanna-featuring title track, peaked inside the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100. The album leaked online nine days before its release date and still posted the 631,000-copy debut.
The Toronto sound, built at home
Primary production came from Noah 40 Shebib, who also engineered and mixed the record, alongside Toronto’s Boi-1da and T-Minus, plus Illangelo, Jamie xx, Just Blaze, Supa Dups, Chase N. Cashe and Doc McKinney. The sound they built, muted synths, sparse drums, low-pass warmth and purposeful empty space, was described at the time as the sound of Toronto hip hop breaking into the mainstream, and it became the template a decade of R&B-leaning rap worked from.
No account of the album is complete without The Weeknd’s part in it. In a 2013 interview he said he gave up almost half of his album to Take Care, explaining that tracks written for his 2011 mixtape House of Balloons ended up on Drake’s record, and that he was thankful for the light it shone on him. Drake and Shebib disputed the scale of that account. What is not disputed is the credit list: The Weeknd appears on Crew Love and worked across the album’s writing and production, and Take Care was the moment most of the world first heard him. iimiTV’s Marvins Room lyrics meaning explainer digs into the album’s most durable late-night record.
The numbers that followed
Take Care won Best Rap Album at the 2013 Grammy Awards, Drake’s first Grammy. In 2020 it was ranked 95th on Rolling Stone’s updated list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The Motto pushed a phrase, YOLO, from a Drake record into the general vocabulary, one of the clearest cases of a Toronto single changing how people far from Toronto talked.
Fifteen years after November 15, 2011, the album’s influence is easiest to hear in everyone else: the sung-rap confessional, the producer-led atmosphere, the Toronto that sounds like 3 a.m. in winter. Take Care was not the first record to do any of that. It was the one that made it the centre of pop music, from a studio in the city it still sounds like.
