The 2020s File Feature
Get Along Better
Drake and Ty Dolla $ign: The Story of "Get Along Better" (2021) "Get Along Better" by Drake featuring Ty Dolla $ign appeared on Drake's sixth studio album "C…
01 The Story
Drake and Ty Dolla $ign: The Story of "Get Along Better" (2021)
"Get Along Better" by Drake featuring Ty Dolla $ign appeared on 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 was one of the most anticipated releases in hip-hop in years, having been delayed multiple times and discussed extensively across social media and music media throughout 2020 and into 2021. Its arrival generated immediate and massive commercial impact: "Certified Lover Boy" debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and simultaneously placed all twenty-one of its tracks on the Billboard Hot 100 in the same week, a feat that had only been matched previously by Taylor Swift. "Get Along Better" was among the tracks that charted as part of this extraordinary first-week performance.
The album was primarily produced by Drake's long-term production associate Noah "40" Shebib, alongside contributions from a range of collaborators including Boi-1da, Murda Beatz, and others who had populated Drake's production credits across his career. "Get Along Better" featured a muted, atmospheric production approach that fit the album's overall sonic mood of introspective R&B inflected with trap elements and melodic rap. Ty Dolla $ign's feature was one of several collaborations on the album that brought in established voices from R&B and hip-hop, including appearances from Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, Future, and Travis Scott, among many others. Ty Dolla $ign's inclusion on "Get Along Better" reflected the song's placement within the album's emotional register of romantic complexity and adult desire.
Ty Dolla $ign brought his characteristic smooth, polished R&B vocal approach to the track, providing a complement to Drake's more conversational delivery that gave the song a layered quality. By 2021, Ty Dolla $ign had established himself as one of the most reliably effective features in contemporary R&B and hip-hop, having contributed to hits by Post Malone, the Weeknd, Kanye West, and numerous others. His vocal presence on "Get Along Better" enhanced the song's commercial appeal and its tonal consistency with the album's overall aesthetic without overshadowing its primary artist.
The cultural context of "Certified Lover Boy's" release was shaped in part by its competition with Kanye West's "Donda," which had been released just a week prior on August 29, 2021. The back-to-back releases from two of hip-hop's biggest commercial forces generated extraordinary media coverage and streaming activity, and the conversation about their relative commercial performance played out in real time on social media in ways that amplified both albums' visibility. Drake's decision to release "Certified Lover Boy" in direct proximity to "Donda" was widely interpreted as a competitive gesture, and the subsequent commercial results, in which "Certified Lover Boy" outperformed "Donda" on first-week charts, reinforced Drake's position as the dominant commercial force in contemporary hip-hop.
The song "Get Along Better" itself received attention for its production texture and its emotional content, fitting within the album's broader exploration of romantic relationships from a perspective of ambivalence and desire. Critical reception for the album as a whole was mixed, with some reviewers praising the sonic consistency and others noting the album's length and the way its emotional range felt limited by its reliance on familiar Drake tropes. "Get Along Better" was generally cited among the stronger individual tracks, its collaboration with Ty Dolla $ign giving it a musical richness that benefited from the contrast between the two artists' vocal approaches.
In streaming terms, "Get Along Better" performed well within the context of the album's extraordinary first-week placement of all tracks on the Hot 100. The song accumulated millions of streams in its initial weeks and maintained presence in streaming playlists in the months that followed, supported by Drake's enormous and loyal audience on Spotify, Apple Music, and other platforms. Drake's streaming dominance by 2021 was well established, and the album's commercial performance reflected not just the quality of individual tracks but the cumulative strength of his relationship with listeners who treated new Drake releases as cultural events requiring immediate engagement.
The song also contributed to the ongoing conversation about Ty Dolla $ign's status as a featured artist whose contributions elevated rather than merely populated the tracks he appeared on. His presence on "Get Along Better" was consistent with a career trajectory that had made him one of the most in-demand collaborators in contemporary popular music, and the Drake collaboration further solidified his position within hip-hop's commercial hierarchy as an artist capable of adding genuine value to any project he touched.
02 Song Meaning
Desire and Reconciliation: The Meaning of "Get Along Better"
"Get Along Better" by Drake featuring Ty Dolla $ign operates within the emotional territory that has defined much of Drake's most commercially successful work: the ambiguous space between romantic desire and emotional caution, between wanting connection and being uncertain about its terms. The song's narrator expresses a wish to move past conflict and achieve the kind of easy intimacy that desire promises but sustained relationships often complicate. The title itself is a distillation of this ambition, stripped of drama or narrative explanation, reduced to a simple and direct statement of what the narrator wants from the relationship being addressed.
The emotional register of the song is one of soft longing rather than urgency or heartbreak, which is a Drake signature that "Get Along Better" deploys with particular refinement. Rather than dramatizing conflict or cataloguing grievances, the song holds the listener in the sensation of wanting things to be easier than they currently are. This quality of patient desire, wanting peace and ease rather than passion or confrontation, gives the track an adult emotional register that distinguishes it from more voluble expressions of romantic frustration. The collaboration with Ty Dolla $ign reinforces this register, his smooth vocal delivery adding a warmth and sensuality that makes the desire feel embodied rather than merely sentimental.
Within Drake's catalog, "Get Along Better" sits in the tradition of his most emotionally accessible material, songs where the vulnerability is real but managed, where the narrator's self-awareness prevents the emotional content from becoming either maudlin or aggressive. Drake's ability to occupy this middle emotional register consistently across a career spanning more than a decade is one of the more remarkable features of his artistic identity, and "Get Along Better" demonstrates it with an ease that reflects both the songwriter's skill and the production framework that 40 and his collaborators constructed around the vocal performances. The muted, atmospheric production creates the right sonic environment for this emotional mode, neither too sparse to feel empty nor too busy to allow the lyrical content to register.
The song also reflects the album's overall project of presenting Drake as a romantic figure whose emotional complexity is a feature rather than a defect. "Certified Lover Boy" was in many ways a catalog of romantic attitudes and situations, and "Get Along Better" contributes the specific emotional note of reconciliatory desire. It positions the narrator as someone who values the relationship enough to want to repair it and who is honest enough to acknowledge that its current state requires improvement. This honesty, even in its understated form, is characteristic of the emotional intelligence that Drake's most effective songs project, and it accounts for much of the song's connection with listeners whose own relationship experiences include the specific frustration of wanting things to be different without knowing exactly how to make them so.
Ty Dolla $ign's contribution shifts the song slightly toward a more explicitly sensual dimension, his verses and vocal textures emphasizing physical attraction alongside emotional connection. This shift creates a productive tension within the track between the more contemplative mode Drake occupies and the more immediate physical warmth that Ty Dolla $ign projects, and that tension gives the song a completeness that either voice alone would not have achieved. Together, they construct a portrait of romantic desire that includes both its emotional and physical dimensions, which is a more complete account of the experience than many pop songs attempt to provide.
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