It’s been six years since Chance the Rapper released his official debut album, The Big Day, and on Aug. 15, he’ll finally release his long-awaited sophomore effort, Star Line. Speaking with Rolling Stone backstage at Lollapalooza, the Chicago MC says the record is steeped in travel and personal change, incorporating different life lessons, experiences, and sounds he encountered over the past several years.
“Going to Ghana, reconnecting with a lot of my family, going through relationships changing, getting divorced — there’s a lot of things that happened between my last project and this day,” Chance says.
Like all of Chance’s albums, there’s plenty of his hometown of Chicago on Star Line, but the time he spent in Ghana, Jamaica, and various domestic locales — New Orleans, Atlanta, Houston, Washington D.C., and New York City — were just as influential.
“There’s a lot of other regions sounds,” Chance says of Star Line, adding: “I think the sounds, production-wise, if they’re not super experimental, they’re based in some of the Black music that was influential to me throughout my childhood or through my travels.”
Amidst a whole lot of personal change, too, Chance says comedian Dave Chappelle gave him some solid advice for how to think about major artistic projects. Chance says the comedian compared stand-up specials and albums to “yearbook photos,” adding: “It’s not the full story of who you are, it’s who you are at that moment. And it’s important to take that snapshot and put it out there so you have documentation of what that moment felt like. And throughout this process, it’s a very cyclical thing of how I felt.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Chance raves about Doechii’s Lolla set; discusses the challenges of navigating the pressures of public perception; and goes deep on his recent single, “Tree,” discussing its crucial India.Arie sample and how the song captures many of the lyrical themes and motifs he explores on the rest of Star Line.
“Within the context of the album, it’s a really important song,” he says. “Because obviously, on the surface, it’s a weed song. But really, it’s about the inequities of the cannabis industry and using that as a metaphor, overall, for the inequities in agriculture. Black folks don’t really own any means of production in a lot of industries, but Black farmers have always had it the toughest in America… The song, for me, was very expressive and very uncensored, but still fun, still inclusive.”
