The Meaning Behind Drake and Lil Yachty’s “Another Late Night”

On October 6, Drake not only included “Another Late Night” as the 21st song on the track list for his For All The Dogs album, but he also provided the music video for the track as well. As his second-ever vocal collaboration with Lil Yachty, and his first-ever visual directed by Lyrical Lemonade founder Cole Bennett, “Another Late Night” has a lot of history involved with it.

Seeing both Drake and Yachty deliver melancholic raps over the groovy, synth-filled instrumental, “Another Late Night” is the product of a years-long relationship between the two rappers. This friendship first began in 2020, after the two first worked together on the hit single “Oprah’s Bank Account,” also featuring DaBaby.

“I feel like that was like a one-time thing for me,” Earl On The Beat, the producer of “Orprah’s Bank Account,” told American Songwriter in a recent interview. “But for [Drake] and Yachty, that was the beginning of their relationship, that record.”

Following this, Yachty would go on to earn production credits on four songs from Drake’s 2022 collaborative album with 21 Savage, Her Loss. On one of the tracks Yachty co-produced with Earl On The Beat, titled “Privileged Rappers.”

[RELATED: Drake and His Father Dennis Graham Slam Joe Budden’s ‘For All The Dogs’ Comments]

Then, when it came to crafting For All The Dogs, Drake finally felt it was time to make another joint song with his new best bud. But, it wasn’t just that Drake wanted to work with Yachty, he also wanted his input on how the album sounded before it came out.

During an episode of his A Safe Place Podcast in early September, Yachty revealed that Drake played him a good chunk of the album to get his opinions. Though Yachty had reservations about the direction Drake was going in, he explained that Drake ultimately convinced him of the vision for FATD, which included “Another Late Night.”

“It’s interesting, it’s coming together a lot better than I thought when I—I just had a talk with him a couple days ago in Vancouver and I was a little worried, ’cause I have a lot of the songs, I don’t have all of ’em, I have a lot of ’em though,” he told A Safe Place co-host Mitch Gone Mad. “And I was just like, ‘Man, I just don’t know if it’s—how are you gon’ put this together? Because it’s like, it’s a lot of great songs but they don’t really—in my brain I was like, they didn’t really sound together.

“And then we had a talk about it and he explained to me his thought process about it. And we drove somewhere, we drove to that video shoot which was like an hour away, and we listened to it, and it makes sense now.”

Even more intriguing is that the video shoot Yachty discusses was the one for “Another Late Night,” which took place in Vancouver. When touching on how the video was made, as it includes shots of illuminated trees in a dark forest, director Cole Bennett said that he emphasized privacy for the artists when selecting a location.

“The [Vancouver] location felt the most tucked away and ducked off, and it was surrounded by trees, and it felt like the safest place to do it and a place where the artist could feel comfortable,” Bennett said in a recent interview.

Overall, it seems that Yachty was around Drake frequently while the latter was finishing up For All The Dogs. And, even when it came to songs that weren’t “Another Late Night,” Yachty’s fingerprints ended up being all over the LP, indicating how close the two have become in recent years.

“I don’t think this album is what it is if I don’t get to run everything by you,” Drake told Yachty on his Sirius XM radio show Sound 42 last Thursday (October 5). “If I don’t get to sit in the studio and write with you, and think with you, and if you don’t send me beats, and if you don’t tell me what you believe in or don’t believe in.”

Photo by Prince Williams/Wireimage