Drizzy explains why losing to “D.O.A.” was particularly painful, and how his album leak compared to J. Cole’s.

Though Drake’s upcoming album, Take Care, is highly-anticipated, the Toronto emcee is still haunted by some heights his career has yet to reach.

In a recent interview with Billboard, Drizzy discussed not yet winning a Grammy.

“I’ve always been fascinated with the Grammys, so I don’t mean disrespect when I say this, but I’ve kind of given up on them,” he revealed. “If I ever get one, or when I get one, I’ll be ecstatic, because that’s a recurring dream I’ve had since I was a kid: That my mother’s still alive and that I’m onstage accepting a Grammy, and I get to thank her on that stage. But it’s tough. They can never really break their mold.”

One loss, however, stuck out to him, was to one of the songs off of Jay-Z Blueprint 3, an album on which Drake was featured. 

“[T]he one that really got to me was when I lost to ‘D.O.A.’ for ‘Best I Ever Had.’ That one to me was, like, really? Not to say that Jay-Z isn’t the most incredible rapper and that ‘D.O.A.’ wasn’t a good song. I just felt like they had an option to give me a Grammy for a mixtape, and they just didn’t do it [laughs]. Because it goes against the grain of everything that is traditional.” 

 

Drake also addressed his album leak, which was compared to J. Cole’s Cole World: A Sideline Story leak. ” Giving people the opportunity to judge before they go and buy, that can only help. There’s a fan base that’s going to go and support you just based off the fact that they want to own a copy of your material, and they know what it means to give you that one sale, and the hope is that there’s another hundred, 200, 300, 400, 500,000 people that are going do the same thing. And then there’s the people who heard it that night and were like, ‘Yo, I need to support this . . . I need to own this.'”