Saba Few Good Things — The Weight Chicago Taught Him to Carry
You cannot grieve the same way twice. That lesson shapes every decision on this album, from the loops that intentionally break mid-phrase to the guest verses Saba allows to exist in their own emotional space rather than forcing them into his narrative. Where Care For Me bled openly through the speakers, Few Good Things closes certain doors on purpose. Saba chooses restraint where fans expected catharsis, choosing daylight where the obvious move was darkness.
The album arrived three years after the project that established him as one of Chicago's sharpest writers, but the city sounds different here — less trapped in its own mythology, more interested in what comes after survival.
The production sits in the aftermath rather than the crisis. daedaePIVOT, Odd Couple, and DJ Dahi build soundscapes that refuse easy categorization — jazz loops that never quite resolve, soul samples that feel like memories of songs rather than the songs themselves, drum patterns that suggest boom bap without committing to it. Is there another Chicago album from this era that sounds this patient? The tempos hover between contemplative and cautious, letting Saba's voice breathe without drowning in empty space.
You hear influences from everywhere — the live instrumentation sensibility of The Roots, the narrative focus of Kendrick, the textural layering of Earl Sweatshirt — but the final product belongs entirely to the West Side. This is what maturity sounds like when the artist refuses to perform it. Saba does not announce that he has grown. He simply writes from a different elevation, examining the same streets that shaped Care For Me but from a window three floors higher.
The pain exists, but so does perspective. The anger remains, but it shares space with gratitude. Few Good Things documents what happens when a rapper who built his reputation on raw emotion decides that survival requires more than bleeding in public.
The Sound of Someone Building Shelter
The production on Few Good Things functions like architecture — deliberate construction designed to hold weight without collapsing. daedaePIVOT anchors most of the album's sonic foundation, crafting loops that feel lived-in rather than polished, instruments that breathe like they belong to real people in real rooms. Odd Couple and DJ Dahi contribute textures that range from vinyl-warm to digitally fractured, often within the same track. The mixing pushes Saba's voice forward without isolating it from the music, creating the intimacy of overhearing someone think out loud rather than watching them perform.
Jazz runs through the album's bloodstream but never announces itself. Upright bass lines anchor several tracks, piano chords appear and vanish like memories, horn sections blow through bridges without overstaying. The samples feel curated by someone who understands the difference between reference and reverence — snippets of gospel, fragments of soul, pieces of conversation that dissolve before you can place them.
Drums stay crisp and present, favoring live-sounding snares and hi-hats over programmed precision. The low end hits physical without overwhelming, bass lines that rumble rather than punch.
Lyrically, Saba operates in the space between confession and craft. His rhyme schemes toggle between complex internal patterns and conversational simplicity, refusing to let technical skill overshadow emotional honesty. He writes about therapy, survivor's guilt, financial anxiety, family obligation, and the cost of fame with the specificity of someone who has actually lived these tensions rather than observed them. When he name-drops Chicago neighborhoods, streets, and people, they function as coordinates in a personal map rather than clout markers.
His pen favors concrete detail over abstraction — the nephew who needs tuition money, the cousin who expects handouts, the therapist who asks questions that hurt to answer. The album's greatest weakness lives in its sequencing. The middle stretch occasionally loses momentum, particularly when slower tempos stack against each other without variation. A handful of tracks could have been trimmed or restructured without losing the narrative thread.
But do these pacing issues feel intentional in a strange way? Saba deliberately chose not to optimize for easy listening, instead building an album that mirrors the uneven rhythm of processing grief and growth. You have to sit with the slower moments the same way you sit with difficult feelings.
Vocally, Saba refuses to force urgency. His delivery stays conversational even when discussing heavy subjects, maintaining a tone that suggests he has already done the screaming in private. He uses melody sparingly, letting his natural speaking cadence dictate the rhythm more often than formal singing. When he does lean into melody, it arrives as emphasis rather than decoration.
Guest features from Krayzie Bone, 6LACK, Eryn Allen Kane, Black Thought, and G Herbo receive real space to exist rather than functioning as brief cameos. Each verse sounds like collaboration rather than transaction, voices that complement Saba's perspective without mimicking it.
The Journey Through Two Sides of the Same Chicago
The album splits into two halves that mirror each other emotionally rather than sonically. The first eight tracks build a foundation of grief, guilt, and survival — Saba examining what it costs to keep living after people you love stop. The second half shifts toward reconstruction without offering easy answers.
Few Good Things never falls into the trap of dividing light from dark cleanly. Both sides contain moments of clarity and confusion, tracks that offer hope immediately followed by tracks that question whether hope matters.
The opening stretch refuses to ease listeners in gently. Saba establishes tone through production choices that feel intentionally abrasive in their beauty — loops that cut off where you expect resolution, samples that sit slightly off-tempo, vocal layers that blur instead of clarify. By the time An Interlude Called "Circus" arrives, the emotional architecture feels solid enough to support weight.
The middle section slows without stalling, creating space for reflection that occasionally tips toward stasis. These are the moments where the album tests patience, asking whether you trust the artist enough to sit through the quiet.
The back half finds energy without abandoning the introspection that defines the project. Tempos increase slightly, drums hit harder, features arrive to shift perspective. The penultimate track functions as a hinge point, looking backward and forward simultaneously before the title track closes the album on its own terms.
The sequencing never chases commercial momentum. Instead, it follows the logic of someone documenting recovery in real time — progress that moves in circles rather than straight lines, healing that looks different every week. The final moments resist the urge to tie everything together with a neat conclusion. Saba ends where he started, still carrying weight, still walking forward.
Where Saba Ranks Among Chicago's Quietly Essential
Few Good Things sits comfortably in the middle of Saba's discography, better than Bucket List Project but lacking the raw emotional devastation that makes Care For Me unrepeatable. It functions as proof that Saba can operate at a high level without relying on trauma as subject matter, even as grief continues to inform his perspective. The album rewards close listening but does not demand it the way his previous work did. You can put this on in the background, but you will miss the craftsmanship if you do.
This album works best for listeners who appreciate lyricism over energy, introspection over anthems, and patience over instant gratification. Fans of Mick Jenkins, Noname, Smino, and Joey Bada$$ will recognize the careful construction, the refusal to pander, the belief that hip-hop can hold complexity without alienating audiences. If you need aggressive production or party tracks, this is not your entry point. But if you want to hear one of Chicago's sharpest writers working through ideas that matter, Few Good Things delivers.
The album has aged quietly well. Nothing here sounds dated two years later because Saba avoided chasing trends in the first place. The production choices that felt unconventional in 2022 now read as forward-thinking, the pacing issues that frustrated some listeners now feel like features rather than bugs. Few Good Things will likely grow in estimation as more people discover it outside the hype cycle, the way Care For Me did.
Essential tracks: Survivor's Guilt, Come My Way, Soldier, 2012, Few Good Things. For deeper exploration, listeners should seek out MIKE's Disco!, Navy Blue's Ways of Knowing, and Quelle Chris's Innocent Country 2. Saba's influence already appears in younger Chicago artists who prioritize writing over performance, artists who treat albums as complete statements rather than playlists. Few Good Things is not a perfect album, but it is a deeply human one — which in 2022, felt rarer than perfection.
Track Listing
Free Samples
▲The album opens with Saba already mid-thought, no introduction, no setup. daedaePIVOT's production feels like walking into a room where a conversation has been happening for hours — jazz piano chords that refuse to land where expected, bass that pulses like anxiety. Saba's flow stays conversational, listing grievances and observations with the casualness of someone who has already screamed about these subjects in private. The hook barely exists, just a repeated phrase that functions more as punctuation than melody. Some listeners will find the lack of traditional structure disorienting. That disorientation is the point.
One Way or Every Nigga With a Budget
▲I heard this in a coffee shop on Ashland Avenue, winter 2022, and watched three different people pull out their phones to Shazam it. The title alone does more work than most full verses — a thesis statement about financial mobility, artistic independence, and the myth of choices. Odd Couple's production sounds expensive in a way that contradicts the lyrical content, plush strings and crisp drums that suggest Saba has already won the budget war he is describing. His pen dissects the economics of independent rap without sounding like a business seminar, specific enough to educate but poetic enough to entertain. The second verse contains some of the album's sharpest internal rhyme schemes, multisyllabic patterns that never call attention to themselves.
Survivor's Guilt
▲This is the album's emotional centerpiece and its most fully realized track. Saba examines the cost of outliving friends and family with forensic precision, naming specific memories, specific people, specific moments that refuse to fade. The production sits back and lets the words breathe — minimal drums, a vocal sample that floats like a ghost, bass notes that hit like punctuation. He writes about therapy without making it sound performative, discusses medication without glamorizing or demonizing it, admits to feeling numb in ways that make numbness sound unbearable. The bar about carrying the weight of everyone who did not make it hits different on the fiftieth listen than the first. This is the track you send to people who think Saba is just another conscious rapper.
An Interlude Called "Circus"
●Forty-seven seconds of voices, laughter, ambient noise — the sound of people existing together without performance. It functions as a breath between heavy subjects, proof that life contains moments that are not defined by grief or ambition. Some will skip it. That would be a mistake.
Fearmonger
▲The darkest production on the album, drums that hit like warning shots, synths that hiss like static. Saba catalogs anxieties without trying to resolve them — financial insecurity, relationship instability, the fear that success will disappear as randomly as it arrived. His flow tightens here, syllables stacking against each other with the urgency of someone who needs to get these thoughts out before they calcify. The hook repeats the word 'fear' until it loses meaning, which might be the point. Not every track needs to offer comfort. This one just documents the panic.
Come My Way
▲The album's most accessible moment, the track casual listeners will gravitate toward first. Krayzie Bone's feature feels like a co-sign from a previous generation, his melodic flow sitting perfectly against daedaePIVOT's sun-soaked production. The beat sounds like summer on the West Side, live bass and warm keys that suggest optimism without naivety. Saba's writing stays sharp even as the mood lightens, bars about attraction and connection that avoid cliché through specific detail. This is the song you play for someone who thinks Chicago rap is all drill and darkness. The bridge builds beautifully, layered vocals that suggest community rather than isolation.
Still
●6LACK's feature anchors this meditation on stillness, his voice adding a layer of world-weariness that complements Saba's introspection. The production moves slowly, almost suspended, drums that barely register as rhythm. Lyrically, Saba examines what it means to stop running from grief long enough to feel it, the difference between processing pain and performing healing. Some lines land heavy, others feel like rough drafts. The second verse meanders when it should sharpen. But the emotional honesty rescues what the execution occasionally fumbles.
A Simpler Time
▲Eryn Allen Kane's vocals carry most of the emotional weight here, her voice functioning as both hook and counterpoint to Saba's reflections on childhood before loss. The production evokes nostalgia without drowning in it, samples that suggest old family videos without directly mimicking them. Saba writes about the specific textures of growing up on the West Side — block parties, family gatherings, the feeling of safety before you understand what safety costs. The track never quite builds to the cathartic moment it seems to promise. That restraint might frustrate some listeners, but it also keeps the song from tipping into sentimentality.
Soldier
▲The beat switch here is criminal — two completely different energies welded together without transition, forcing the listener to adjust in real time. Saba's pen stays militant without sounding performative, writing about survival as active resistance rather than passive endurance. His flow shifts between clipped and expansive, syllables that punch and syllables that stretch. The production nods to drill without committing fully, 808s that rattle but never overwhelm, hi-hats that suggest aggression without becoming parody. This is the track that proves Saba can make harder music when he chooses to, he just refuses to make it his entire identity.
If I Had a Dollar
▲The most technically impressive writing on the album, internal rhyme schemes so dense they require multiple listens to fully appreciate. Saba catalogs hypothetical wealth with the specificity of someone who has done the math, knows exactly what financial freedom would cost, understands the difference between stability and excess. The production stays minimal to let the wordplay shine — bass, drums, a piano loop that repeats without variation. Some bars feel like freestyles captured in the moment, thoughts that arrived fully formed. Others sound meticulously crafted, revised until every syllable locked into place. The mix of spontaneity and precision gives the track an uneven energy that somehow works.
Stop That
▲Black Thought's verse is a masterclass, technical precision meeting thematic depth in ways that make Saba's solid verse sound pedestrian by comparison. The Roots legend delivers the kind of writing that reminds you why he is still mentioned in top-ten conversations twenty-five years into his career. Saba holds his own, but this is Thought's track. The production mirrors the lyrical sharpness — boom bap drums, a jazz sample chopped into rhythmic fragments, bass that hits hard without muddying the mix. If this song appeared on a different album, it would be the standout. Here, it is excellent but not essential.
Make Believe
▼The weakest track on the album, a concept that never fully develops. Saba examines the gap between perception and reality, the ways people construct false narratives about artists based on limited information. The idea has potential, but the execution feels tentative. The production lacks the texture that defines the album's stronger moments, drums that hit without purpose, a melody that repeats without evolving. His flow sounds uncertain here, like he is still figuring out what he wants to say. Not every song can be essential, and this one functions more as connective tissue than statement.
2012
▲G Herbo's feature brings a different Chicago energy, his voice carrying the street perspective that Saba acknowledges but does not inhabit. The track functions as a conversation between two versions of the city — Saba's introspective West Side and Herbo's militant East Side, both valid, both necessary. The production finds middle ground, hard drums softened by soulful samples, aggression tempered by melody. Saba's writing here focuses on the year he started taking rap seriously, specific memories of recording in basements, performing for empty rooms, believing in a future that most people could not see. The nostalgia never becomes maudlin because both rappers anchor it in concrete detail.
Few Good Things
▲The title track closes the album without attempting to summarize it. Saba reflects on gratitude as an active practice rather than a passive feeling, listing the few good things that make survival worthwhile even when survival feels impossible. His mother's voice appears in the outro, a grounding presence that connects the album's beginning to its end. The production stays sparse — just drums, bass, and a sample that sounds like wind through empty buildings. Some listeners will want a bigger finale, something that ties the album together with a dramatic conclusion. Saba refuses. He ends where he started, still carrying weight, still grateful for small mercies, still here. That might be the most honest ending possible.
