This year, Saba toured CARE FOR ME with his brother, Joseph Chilliams, and cousin, Jean Deaux. With more pieces come more opportunities to have a live show go wrong, but they’ve gone so right these days: sustainable, independent, impactful. He mentions how he’s become more of a gearhead since our last encounter, motioning to his Apollo interface as he recounts how the Auto-Tune running through Ableton - a first-time tour addition - managed to only crash in Utah. The introversion seeps from his gentle, low register sometimes he looks down when he thinks, but he’s thinking really hard and he definitely hears you. There’s a BBC red trucker hat tucked on his forehead, a single gold chain bordering his blue/red-striped Fat Tiger shirt with some tapered red/white-striped pants.

As long as I’ve known him, that was never his wave he merely looks… sleepy. I smirk, knowing Saba - like me - remains one of the most sober souls on the face of the Earth. When we finally enter, we’re met with various baseline vices strewn about the end table: some Miller High Lifes, a Bombay Sapphire bottle, a lil water, a lil weed. I meet him the day after his Pitchfork set at the studio, which was jammed up for 20 minutes. The perfection of the sun breaking up the bleak, the way CARE FOR ME broke up his grief over Walt’s passing, wasn’t lost on Saba at all he hoped for that shit.

As a color of limbo, the space between black and white, there was no middle ground remaining once all that “cute shit’s out the window!” The crowd ignited, the homies stormed the stage, and some West Side niggas went indubitably crazy. Here’s the kicker, and it’s not even corny: As the huddled masses soaked in the overcast weather, somewhere in the final 15 minutes of this historic communion of pain and perseverance, the grey surrendered to the sun. (Saba’s grandfather was present on his medical scooter alongside many other family members grandma, unfortunately, had to work.) It looks like the same kitchen where Saba fondly remembers playing second-in-command to his uncle, a budding chef, soul food on the stove.

Saba took us to his grandmama house: a wooden replica of her kitchen as the backdrop, like the one off Austin on the Green Line. You know DAM DAM was on the tables, Daoud and Dae Dae on the keys and synths, and the late John Walt posted as an angel somewhere in the outfield.

It’s another Pitchfork Festival, the year 2018, making this cliché even more irresistible: Saba, born Tahj Malik Chandler, has just given the Red Stage his only Chicago performance in support of the CARE FOR ME album that’s piqued the interest of nearly every critic with a year-end list while galvanizing the new Chicago renaissance once again. Sign Up By October 31 To Receive This AlbumĪllow my indulgence in a cliché: Chicago, a Friday overcast, the sun occasionally creeping past the clouds to drench Union Park in warmth.

Saba care for me vinyl