I’ve talked about extended chords in the past but as a reminder, extended chords are chords that consist of more than three pitches. Another quality of that “Drake Sound” is the use of ~dreamy~ chords. Or at least there would be a lot more space in the verses. I know this is a weird distinction to try and make but a traditional pop song wouldn’t have a melody like this. Yes, it IS sung by Drake but the phrasing of the lyrics are closer to that of rapping. Notice how I didn’t say singing and/or rapping? “God’s Plan” is somewhere in the middle. But WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? Well, we can break down some of those. What does that mean? In saying this, I mean that it is very characteristic of other Drake songs.

Some rappers might want to take note of this. Normally, this lack of instrumental definition would probably infuriate me but because Drake has a strong sense of melody we are able to clearly tell when the chorus comes even with no change of instrumentation. That doesn’t quite happen with “God’s Plan”. Usually, we hear these differences at the start of new sections signifying a chorus or a verse. And this is a good thing! It helps to differentiate one section of the song from another. You don’t realize how quiet the accompaniment is until we hear those drums. There’s a big gap in the dynamic range based on when the percussion kicks in. This is fine because we know what we’re getting ourselves into. Verse, chorus, post-chorus and repeat it all. The form is simple as laid out on Genius.

Gods plan drake genius