Drake recently sat down with Rap Radar for a wide-ranging conversation about his career—and he told the tale of how “God’s Plan” went from a Trippie Redd toss-off to a No. 1 hit on the Hot 100.
The Canadian rapper originally sent the demo to his Ohio counterpart. “‘God’s Plan’ was a song that I recorded on a whim in my condo and thought nothing of it,” he said. “I only had the first verse and the hook. I sent it to Trippie. I was like, ‘Yo, maybe this could work for your album.’ He was obviously caught up, busy, doing his thing. I know people punish him for that. They shouldn’t punish him for that, though.”
Earlier this year, the “Love Scars/You Hurt Me” artist talked to Complex about how he lost out on the massive hit. “It’s no excuse, I could have did the song whenever I pleased to do it,” he said. “I had the song for two months. I could have did that shit. I was sitting back taking my time on it because it was like, if I get on this shit I really gotta snap.”
But the track ended reaching the public ahead of schedule. “Then it leaked, and people forced my hand because they were like, ‘Yo, that shit sounds hard,’” Drake recalled. “We had to rush and turn around because I was worried that another artist was gonna get the version and just start laying random verses on it—which back in the day was a huge hustle for people, getting one-verse idea leaks and then a random artist… would just be like, ‘Yeah, this is me and Drake’s new shit.’”
“We were rushing, rushing, rushing to try to turn it around in the next two days,” he continued. “I was just like, ‘Yo, I have to do a second verse. It has to be hard.’”
He ended up adding in this line:
I only love my bed and my mama, I’m sorry
Drake credits a higher power with taking him to the next level. “I never could’ve told you a week before that ‘God’s Plan’ was my single and it was gonna be the biggest song of my career,” he said. “I never would’ve known that. My hand just got forced. I do feel as though I can put in the maximum amount of effort, I can use all my heart and my soul in my writing. But at the end of the day, I am being guided by some other power. I don’t know what it is, but somebody likes me somewhere. And that’s just the facts. A lot of this is organic, it’s not that calculated.”
However, he admits that he’s not always in the right place at the right time. “I was looking through my texts the other day, and Young Thug sent me that “Lil Baby” song to get on, and I was so mad,” Drake told Rap Radar. “He had sent me 12 songs, but in that 12-song package, “Lil Baby” was in there. I was like, ‘Damn, that’s one of my favorite joints on the album. How did I not get a verse off on that?’”
Watch the full interview above, and catch up on all the lyrics to “God’s Plan” on Genius now.
