"How Chance the Rapper’s Life Became Perfect"

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"When Chance walks in, the room doesn't so much perk up as get more tranquil. He's got a kind of calming force to him, like he's got fewer moving parts than most people. Slender, hat pulled low, quizzical eyebrows, mustache—he looks, from across the room, like what would happen if someone challenged you to draw a man in five lines or less...

I sat in the room and listened to his voice. There's nothing like it in music right now. It's its own jazz instrument, bright and unpredictable as a trumpet, primary colored, a cheerful roar soaked in a meditative sadness. He's an uncommonly dexterous rapper, but it's the voice—the physical quality of it, the way it feels textured by experience and elation—that's truly remarkable...

The majority of Coloring Book ended up getting made in about two months: March and April. Chance slept in the studio for most of it, with his girlfriend and his new daughter. Studio One. “No smoke, no foolishness.” Chance's mother and his father—a lifelong community organizer in Chicago who used to work for then state senator Barack Obama—coming by regularly to check on him and visit their granddaughter.

One of the last things he did was this: “I had the first verse for the intro song, which is called ‘All We Got.’ ” As in: Music is all we've got. Hook by Kanye West. The song has one of the all-time rap boasts, too: I was baptized like real early / I might give Satan a swirlie. Anyway, there was a part of the song that was troubling Chance. First verse. “There was a lyric where I say: Life was never perfect / I could merch it. And for the first, like, the last two months before the project came out, that was the line. It was: Life was never perfect. And I remember, the last week I was like, ‘Let me go in there and do a dub’ ”—an overdub—“and say, Man, I swear my life is perfect. Because I don't know if I really want people repeating that and thinking that and shouting that to me from the crowd on a stage. ‘Life was never perfect.’ Life is perfect! You know?”"

http://www.gq.com/story/how-chance-the-rappers-life-became-perfect

He's great. It's true, too, I have a clear memory of the first time I heard one of his songs because of how much he communicated in the inflection of his voice, it just grabs you.