Drake’s second studio album Take Care turns 15 today, released on November 15, 2011 and still the record that defines his sound. The Take Care 15th anniversary arrives with the album newly complete on streaming, after its long-missing bonus track joined the deluxe edition on Spotify on November 13.
That bonus track is Hate Sleeping Alone, produced by Noah “40” Shebib with additional vocals from Trey Songz. It sat on the deluxe edition from the start in 2011, spent years available on Apple Music, and stayed absent from Spotify until this week. iimiTV covered that streaming arrival on its own when the update landed. This post is about the album itself, fifteen years on.
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HATE SLEEPING ALONE (DSP). Dropping ahead of the 15-year anniversary of Take Care. (Complex Music, announcing the update)
The Take Care 15th anniversary, by the tracklist
The album runs 18 tracks in its standard edition, opening with Over My Dead Body and closing with The Ride. Between those poles sit the songs that built a era of Toronto R&B and rap: Headlines, Crew Love with The Weeknd, Marvins Room, Take Care with Rihanna, HYFR with Lil Wayne, and The Motto, the deluxe bonus cut that carried YOLO into the language. The production bench was just as deep, with 40, Boi-1da, T-Minus, Just Blaze and Jamie xx all contributing.
Read as a sequence, the record moves like a night out in the city that made him. Lord Knows brings Rick Ross in for the album’s hardest rap moment, Cameras folds into Good Ones Go as an interlude, and Doing It Wrong hands its closing minutes to a Stevie Wonder harmonica part. Few rap albums of its decade trusted quiet songs this much, and fewer still were rewarded for it.
What the album won and what it changed
Take Care won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, and its commercial run never really stopped. Its bigger legacy is structural. The album proved a rap star could build a blockbuster out of singing, confession and atmosphere, a template that reshaped how Toronto artists presented themselves to the world and how the world’s labels came looking for them.
For Canadian hip hop, the date matters beyond one catalogue. November 15, 2011 is a reasonable marker for the moment a Toronto artist stopped asking for a seat in the American conversation and started hosting it. The Weeknd’s presence on Crew Love and Take Care, recorded while he was still an emerging Toronto voice, ties the album to the second pillar of the city’s global run.
Why the deluxe fix matters now
Streaming-era catalogue only stays alive when it is complete. A deluxe edition missing one of its two bonus songs trains a generation of listeners to know a slightly smaller album than the one fans bought in 2011. Restoring Hate Sleeping Alone, a 3 minute 34 second record with a 2011 Cash Money copyright line, closes that gap in the anniversary week itself, whether or not a fuller reissue ever follows. No anniversary edition has been announced, and nothing in this week’s update promises one.
Fifteen years on, Take Care holds its place as the essential Drake album for new listeners and the reference point every later Drake era gets measured against. Today is a good day to run it front to back, bonus tracks included, in the order Toronto first heard it.
