Solar Eclipse

“Solar Eclipse” opens with Drake repeating a lightly rewritten version of “Choosin’ Texas”’s own chorus hook, then handing the Auto-Tuned melody off to Don Toliver, who runs the same tune through a chopped-up sample of Bun B’s “Get Throwed” before the two of them settle into a hazy, R&B-inflected account of a complicated Texas romance – Drake namechecks College Station, River Oaks, Sugar Land, Pearland, The Woodlands, and Fort Bend along the way, plus a stray Johnny Manziel reference, in case anyone doubted the setting. It is, structurally, a country song’s hook wearing a completely different genre’s clothes, right down to Toliver swapping Ella Langley’s “Jack” for “yak” – slang for Cognac – in the one lyric the two songs actually share.

That’s a clever bit of songwriting math, and it’s the only idea the track really has. Once the Langley interpolation stops being a novelty, “Solar Eclipse” settles into the same moody, mid-tempo lane as most of Drake’s recent output – competent Auto-Tune melodicism, a serviceable Toliver verse, nothing that argues for its own existence independent of the song it’s borrowing from. It arrived October 2 as one of four new tracks on the deluxe “Encore” edition of Drake’s Habibti (FOMO), premiered after months of very public flirtation with Langley’s record – a “Goated pen” comment on her Instagram, an appearance at her Arkansas tour stop, an earlier, unofficial remix whose backstage footage of the two artists together was quietly pulled from Drake’s own re-upload before this official version ever reached streaming. None of that context makes the song itself more interesting to listen to; it mostly explains why it exists at all.

What it does unambiguously do is chart. “Solar Eclipse” opened at No. 5 on the Hot 100 – Drake’s record-extending 91st top-10 hit and Toliver’s highest-charting song to date – on the strength of 18 million-plus Spotify streams in its first week, landing three spots behind “Choosin’ Texas” itself, which the interpolation is still riding more than a year after its original release. That’s the same mechanism this column keeps flagging around deluxe-era rollouts: an built-in audience and a recognizable hook can put a song in the top five regardless of whether the writing underneath earns it. Toliver’s half of the song is the stronger performance, and the whole thing is listenable enough as background – but a song whose single most memorable four bars belong to somebody else’s record from an entirely different genre is not making much of a case for its own songwriting. 5.6/10 – a competent victory lap, borrowed from the song actually doing the work.

Hero image: Drake at the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of “The Carter Effect,” 2017, by GabboT, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.