Last year, Saba’s cousin was stabbed to death in Chicago after a brief scuffle on the train. The killer tailed him for half a block before fleeing, just to make sure he would die. The way Saba raps about his cousin—born Walter Long Jr., who performed as Dinnerwithjohn and was a founding member of Saba’s Pivot Gang crew—you’d think he was magical, kissed by fortune his entire life. He was Saba’s mentor, his wingman, dauntless and deathless until, suddenly, he wasn’t.
To be young is often to be fixated on your own presumed indestructibility. Reality has a way of knocking that right out of you. Saba’s gorgeous, meditative new album, Care for Me, begins with him singing the words “I’m so alone.” Isolation and trauma go hand-in-hand when you lose someone close, especially when that someone served as your shield for so long. “Jesus got killed for our sins, Walter got killed for a coat,” he raps. “I’m tryna cope, but it’s a part of me gone, and, apparently, I’m alone.”
Care for Me processes grief and its attendant loneliness, the paradox of feeling secluded during the most connected era in history, and having to manage that misery inside the social gratification matrix—the machine of hearts, smileys, and dopamine hits. The album, in turn, bears out the exhaustion that comes with simply processing. Saba attempts to grapple with his ongoing depression as he wonders aloud if he’s really the only one. Through this inner turmoil, he finds his most powerful and diaristic storytelling.
“Carefully editing every word, everything got to be charity/Give it my all, these melodies therapy,” he raps on “Grey,” a kind of subtitle for the all-caps plea of the album’s name. The songs are cathartic, yes, but they are also engaging. He seeks solace for his audience as much as he seeks it for himself. His writing carries within it an empathic power, the sensation of peering into a photograph so long it conjures the textures of a memory. “Life” uses personal dread as a lens through which to examine the rat race that is trying to survive. “They want a barcode on my wrist/To auction off the kids that don’t fit their description of a utopia (Black)/Like a problem won’t exist if I just don’t exist,” he raps before nose-diving into a more pervasive existential crisis: “Life don’t mean shit to a nigga that ain’t never had shit.”
Given the context under which Care for Me was made, Saba’s 2016 debut, Bucket List Project, feels almost prescient. That album challenged listeners to see their ambitions through because time was of the essence. It was a sonic wishing well of sorts, a hopeful album of unfulfilled dreams and limitless potential. With a Walter-sized hole in Saba’s life, reassesses that optimism. Through carefully collected and arranged memory fragments—some clear and focused, some concealed and disorienting—Saba considers what it means now for his cousin’s dreams to go forever unrealized.
Composed entirely by Saba with producer DaedaePivot and multi-instrumentalist Daoud, Care for Me is meticulously structured, orchestrated, and arrayed. Songs reveal themselves to be mementos of transformational moments in his life. A choice few attempt to capture something more ephemeral: the fleeting feeling of being safe, being comfortable and well-adjusted. (At one point, Saba waxes nostalgically about a time before insomnia, sleeping peacefully and living sober and college-bound, harkening back to a childlike innocence.) The 23-year-old’s fleet, singsongy raps bend and tuck into his largely piano-centric arrangements, which build sets for the scenarios he’s reliving. His voice can sway from muted and understated to insistent in an instant; he subtly shifts from conversational to explanatory whenever the mood calls for it, but never at the expense of the narrative flow. He sees his reflection in these remembrances and confronts his own mortality, but in the process he finds something divine.
So much of Care for Me is an ongoing conversation trying to reconcile a cruel, unforgiving world with God’s plan. Saba hasn’t lost his faith, but his patience is running thin. Each note and phrase on the album is colored to depict this struggle. The instrumentation is bracing, almost as if played live for a crowd, but it has the intimate tenor and tone of Saba recording the entire thing alone in his basement. “Fighter” is submerged and glassy, its watery sheen glistening like it’s catching sunlight; Saba surfaces from this shimmer as if cresting in a wave pool. “It’s harder to love myself when all these people compliment me,” he raps, conflicted. It’s brutal moments of vulnerability like this that make Care for Me such an enveloping experience.
Saba’s stunning exploration of loss builds to a restorative climax: the one-two punch that is the dewy-eyed odyssey “Prom / King” and the skyward-bound drifter “Heaven All Around Me.” The former chronicles Saba’s relationship with Walter, as seen through key events in their shared history—Walter finding Saba a last-minute date for prom, the pair getting skipped over at open mics, and early attempts on Walter’s life, leading up to the instant Saba learned his cousin was missing. “We got in the car, but we didn’t know where to drive to/Fuck it, wherever you are, my nigga, we’ll come and find you,” he raps. His writing is so dense yet free-flowing, so delicate and tactile. The drums crescendo into a frenzy on “Prom / King,” to the point that Saba keeps his own time, untethered to rhythm, while never missing a single beat. The song is devastating, but it would feel almost hopeless without “Heaven,” a glowing conclusion to the saga that imagines a reborn Walter ascending to a better place, looking down watchfully at his loved ones and looking after Saba. It’s a remarkably powerful scene, a moment where Saba comes to realize that, despite everything, he was never alone and he never will be.
