The 2020s File Feature
Fountains
Fountains: Drake and Tems Build a Transatlantic Masterpiece "Fountains" is one of the most distinctive and widely discussed tracks from Drake's sixth studio …
01 The Story
Fountains: Drake and Tems Build a Transatlantic Masterpiece
"Fountains" is one of the most distinctive and widely discussed tracks from Drake's sixth studio album "Certified Lover Boy," released on September 3, 2021, through Young Money Entertainment, Cash Money Records, Republic Records, and OVO Sound. The album arrived after months of anticipation and delay caused in part by Drake's recovery from knee surgery and the logistical disruptions of the ongoing pandemic. Its release coincided with a heated public rivalry between Drake and rapper Kanye West, whose album "Donda" had dropped the week before, creating an extraordinary moment of competition between two of the most commercially dominant artists in hip-hop.
"Certified Lover Boy" debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with over 613,000 album-equivalent units in its first week, making it one of the most consumed debut-week albums in recent chart history. The figure was a testament to both Drake's established commercial dominance and the extraordinary level of fan anticipation that had built around the project over its extended delay. The album set several single-week streaming records upon its release.
"Fountains" features Tems, the Nigerian singer and songwriter born Temilade Openiyi, whose voice and artistic sensibility brought an entirely different sonic dimension to the track. Tems had already been gaining international attention for several years through acclaimed releases in the Afrobeats and Afrofusion spaces, and her inclusion on one of the year's most anticipated albums introduced her work to a global audience that went well beyond her existing fanbase. Her appearance on "Fountains" is widely credited with accelerating her commercial breakthrough in Western markets, contributing to the momentum that would make her one of the most prominent African artists of the early 2020s.
The production on "Fountains" draws on Afrobeats influences in a manner that is both genuinely engaged and carefully constructed for crossover consumption. The rhythmic approach, the melodic choices, and the overall sonic palette reflect the genre's characteristic warmth and movement, creating one of the most sonically adventurous moments on an album that otherwise largely operates within Drake's established sonic comfort zone. The track was produced by Kes from South Africa and Rogét Chahayed, bringing expertise in African music production to the session that gave the final record an authenticity that less carefully assembled Afrobeats-crossover attempts often lack.
The song's visual campaign, including its official music video shot in Africa, reinforced its thematic and sonic investment in the continent's musical traditions and its specific geographic references. The choice to film in Africa rather than defaulting to North American or European location shoots was noted by critics as a meaningful commitment to the song's geographic subject matter rather than mere aesthetic borrowing.
Commercially, "Fountains" performed strongly across streaming platforms and in markets where Afrobeats had strong existing audiences, while also circulating widely in mainstream streaming playlists internationally. The song demonstrated that Drake's audience was willing to follow him into sonic territory that departed significantly from his core formula, as long as the execution was of sufficient quality. It also demonstrated that Tems was capable of commanding equal footing on a track with one of music's biggest stars, a demonstration that her subsequent solo success would confirm.
For students of contemporary popular music, "Fountains" stands as a notable example of how Afrobeats gained mainstream Western crossover traction in the early 2020s through strategic collaborations that placed African artists alongside established Western stars. The song is among the more musically ambitious entries in Drake's catalog and one of the records most directly responsible for Tems's international breakthrough. The specific combination of a globally dominant rapper, a rising Nigerian vocal talent, and producers with genuine roots in African music traditions produced something that felt more than transactional, a record whose cross-cultural ambitions were supported by the actual musical choices rather than merely announced by them. Critics who reviewed "Certified Lover Boy" in its entirety frequently cited "Fountains" as one of the album's brightest moments precisely because it represented the kind of risk-taking that Drake's enormous commercial position rarely requires him to take. The willingness to step outside the established formula and build an entire track around Tems's voice and an Afrobeats framework was a curatorial choice that paid off musically and helped Tems build the international momentum that her subsequent solo releases would convert into independent stardom.
02 Song Meaning
Fountains: Longing, Distance, and the Pull of Geographic Roots
"Fountains" operates in an emotional register quite distinct from most of Drake's catalog, exchanging the introspective relationship dynamics and Toronto-centric references of his core work for something more outward-looking and geographically specific. The song is built around themes of longing for a place and a way of life that feel far away, with the fountain as a central image of both memory and desire. This is a love song, but the object of love is as much a place and a cultural world as it is a person.
Tems's contributions give the song its most emotionally direct moments. Her voice carries a quality that is simultaneously powerful and vulnerable, capable of communicating depth of feeling without the theatrical excess that lesser performances in this emotional register risk. Her presence transforms "Fountains" from a Drake song featuring a guest vocalist into a genuine duet, a dialogue between two perspectives that enriches the thematic content considerably. The call-and-response dynamic between their vocal approaches creates a sense of genuine conversation across emotional and geographic distance.
The Afrobeats production framework chosen for the track is itself thematically meaningful. By building the song on a sonic foundation rooted in West African musical traditions, the production team creates an environment in which the themes of longing for African culture and African places feel organically embodied rather than merely referenced. The music does not merely describe a feeling; it inhabits one. This formal-thematic alignment is one of the most sophisticated production choices on the album.
Drake's verses on the track show a genuine engagement with themes of diaspora and longing that connect, if at some remove, to his own experience as someone who has always maintained a complicated, emotionally loaded relationship with place and belonging. His identity as a Toronto artist who has spent enormous amounts of time in the United States, in international cities, and on the road creates its own version of the longing the song describes, even if it is expressed through a more distanced, observational relationship to the specific geographic references Tems brings from her own experience.
The image of fountains throughout the song functions as a symbol of abundance, cleansing, and return. Fountains are architectural features associated with gathering, with public space, with the physical center of communities. To long for a fountain is to long for a specific kind of communal life and physical place, a home with its own particular rituals and aesthetics. The image is evocative without being didactic, suggesting rather than explaining the nature of the longing it represents.
For Tems specifically, the song marked an important moment in her artistic development as someone capable of communicating her experience and emotional world to a genuinely global audience without compromising the specificity that makes that experience meaningful. The tension between remaining authentic to a particular cultural origin and speaking to a universal emotional experience is one that every artist from outside the Western mainstream must navigate, and "Fountains" is among her most successful early navigations of that challenge.
The song's emotional impact lies in its willingness to sit with longing rather than resolve it, to describe the feeling of distance from something beloved without offering either the comfort of reunion or the clarity of final separation. This ambivalence is emotionally true to the experience the song describes and gives it a resonance that more neatly resolved narratives rarely achieve.
→ More from Drake Featuring Tems
View all Drake Featuring Tems hits →
→ More from the 2020s File
View all 2020s hits →
Keep digging