Drake: Interview With Nashville's Vanderbilt University Newspaper

via Inside Vandy (Versus Magazine section)

Versus Magazine: This is not your first trip to Nashville, correct?

Drake: No, it’s not. Nashville is a great city and my father lives in Memphis, so I used to drive down here all the time in this Mercury Cougar [laughs]… and that’s where I got a lot of music knowledge, actually. My dad used to give me 30 minutes to play hip hop on the 24 or 25 hour drive — he’d let me put on rap tapes and then he’d make me listen to Marvin Gaye, The Spinners … that really penetrated my mind as a young kid. So, yeah, the whole state of Tennessee is very valuable to me.

VM: There were a couple interviews where you said the money wasn’t the most important thing. And obviously you’re very in control of your career, and it just strikes me that you’re very smart in that a lot of people in the position that you’re in will just sign away everything just to have that shot.

Drake: I always saw the value of what we can build on our own. We did “So Far Gone” by ourselves, really. My managers hadn’t even heard of it until it was out two days later. It was important to me to keep that grassroots feel. All I really wanted was creative freedom, and a lot of people could not offer me that, so I took the situation and considered that. There is nobody that can come to me and say, “We need this album on this day,” there’s nobody that can come to me and say, “The cover has to look like this,” “You have to dress like this,” there’s nobody that can tell me what to rap about or what shows to go to, there’s nobody that can tell me anything. If you have an opinion, of course I will listen to it, but there’s no one that controls my position in this game. And that way, if I make a mistake, I get to look at myself in the mirror and go, “You gotta pull it together.” Because I don’t like being able to say, “It was that guy’s fault.” I want to learn from my mistakes.

Read the full Drake interview here:
Inside Vandy - Q&A with Drake: "'Are we crazy?' And it took a while…it takes a while."

Drake - 'Thank Me Later' on Young Money/Cash Money/Universal is slated for February 16, 2010.