About This Track
'SMILE' pulls back from the weight of its album to find lightness in memory. Saba reminisces about his childhood in his grandmother's Westside Chicago apartment, where red brick, forgotten gardens and splotchy grass stand in for a life lived without much. The song moves between those small, warm moments, tube socks slipping off feet, backyard basketball, family gathered close, and the harder present tense where cousins trap, grandmas worry about strange smells, and keeping the lights on is a real struggle. The track holds both at once. Saba raps about taking life for granted whilst trying to capture it, about making a million dollars so he can move his family somewhere better, about keeping things honest even when everyone else is talking big. His grandmother's lessons sit alongside his cousin's mail-order schemes. The chorus, sung by multiple voices, is simple and insistent: just smile, smile, smile. It's not naive. It's a small act of resistance, a way of holding onto something when the world feels splotchy and incomplete.
"SMILE" is a track by Saba, from the album CARE FOR ME, released 5th April 2018. Full lyrics are available below.
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