The Samples Behind Anderson .Paak and Cordae’s Heavy Is the Crown

Cordae and Anderson .Paak in the Step Brothers-style portrait from the Heavy Is the Crown campaign. Image via Mixtape Madness

The lead single from Anderson .Paak and Cordae’s first joint album opens on three generations at once. On “A Good Day”, the beat from Hollywood Cole, J. Cole’s production alias, is built on Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” and a Fatman Scoop chant, and .Paak’s first line interpolates Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day”. Soul, a hype man’s chant and West Coast storytelling, all inside one hook.

That is the clearest way into Heavy Is the Crown, the collaborative album Anderson .Paak and Cordae released on 23 October under the duo name Dae.Paak. It runs just over half an hour, it wears its references openly, and it turns a Step Brothers joke into a record about what two men owe their families. Here is where the samples and interpolations come from, and what they say about the lineage the pair are claiming.

How Anderson .Paak and Cordae Got to a Full Album

The partnership was a long time coming. The two have been friends for years and have collaborated often since 2019, as The Arts Desk notes. The album’s press release, as published by Tinnitist, points back to songs including “RNP”, “Two Tens” and “Summer Drop”, and to a run of loose television performances that played more like friends locking in than a planned campaign. Heavy Is the Crown is the first time that chemistry has been given a full tracklist.

The packaging leans into the comedy. The cover parodies the poster for the film Step Brothers, with the pair posed in matching argyle sweater vests against a mottled studio backdrop, and the album’s opening track borrows the film’s absurd energy. The title points somewhere heavier: the press release describes it as a reference to the weight both men carry as providers and anchors for their families.

The split of roles is familiar from their earlier songs. The press release casts .Paak as the soul-rich musician and Cordae as the sharp, grounded lyricist. Mixtape Madness found that .Paak also holds his own as a rapper across the record, while still leaving room for his singing.

58th Floor and the Biggie Blueprint

The record starts with a phone call. According to the Daily Campus review, the first half of “58th Floor” is structured as a phone conversation between the two, and may interpolate the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Warning” and “Suicidal Thoughts”, two songs built the same way. In the sketch, .Paak escapes a woman’s apartment through the window when her child’s father comes home from prison, a scene that could have been lifted from Step Brothers.

The second half of the track settles into a laid-back groove, with Cordae rapping about holding on to the things he loved as a child while building a rap career. It is a small moment, but it sets the album’s central tension: two established artists trying to grow up without losing the part of themselves that started making music in the first place.

“Airbender” pushes the same idea through a children’s cartoon. The track borrows its name from Avatar: The Last Airbender, rides high-pitched strings over a punchy drum pattern, and gives .Paak room to place Dae.Paak in a line of rap duos, comparing the pair to Eminem and Dr. Dre and to Danny Brown and JPEGMafia. The comparison is a boast, but it is also a statement of where they want the album filed.

Bill Withers, Ice Cube and the Making of A Good Day

“A Good Day” is the album’s most obvious sample record, and the one that shows the producers’ thinking most clearly. Withers’ “Lovely Day” brings a warm, unhurried soul mood that fits a single about a carefree day out. Layering a Fatman Scoop chant on top drags it from a Sunday-morning soul record into a club call-and-response, and .Paak’s nod to Ice Cube then places the whole thing inside West Coast rap history.

Not every critic thinks the pieces fit. The Arts Desk’s Erin Lewis wrote that the samples on “A Good Day” are “never interpolated well enough into the rest of the track and sometimes feel at odds with the rest of the production”, and made a similar complaint about the “really chopped up string sound” on “Airbender”. Daily Campus took the opposite view, calling the single “truly fun” and praising the head-bopping chorus the samples build.

Either way, the choice is deliberate. A record that leads with Bill Withers is asking to be heard in the long line of soul-sampling hip-hop, the line the producers credited here have spent their careers working in.

Common, Kanye and the Woman Who Stands for Hip-Hop

The most pointed reference comes on “You’re Mine”, which borrows a line from Common’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.”, the song that personified hip-hop as a woman the narrator grew up with and watched change. Kanye West reused the same idea on “Homecoming”. Daily Campus reads Dae.Paak’s version as the third entry in that tradition, following the pair as they grew up loving the music and watched it travel to other countries and split into new subgenres.

It is also the clearest sign of what the album thinks it is. Interpolating Common is not a sample for texture; it is a claim of descent. Whether “You’re Mine” pushes the metaphor far enough is debatable, and Daily Campus felt it did not move the narrative much further. But the instinct to place themselves next to Common and Kanye is the same instinct that puts Bill Withers on the lead single.

Later, “Godfather II” swaps the soul references for mafia imagery, with the duo cast as men in black suits stepping out of expensive cars, and names Jay-Z, Kanye, Raekwon and Ghostface Killah among the greats they want to stand beside.

The Producers Behind the Pocket

The credits explain why the album holds together despite its many references. Mixtape Madness lists production from Hollywood Cole, Conductor Williams, FNZ, 9th Wonder and Caleb Oh among others, and credits the beat selection with giving both artists “a dependable foundation” while keeping a cohesive sound across the tape.

The common thread, in that reading, is consistency. Mixtape Madness argued that the beat selection “just makes perfect sense” and that the album never makes either artist compromise their identity to accommodate the other. For a duo record built on references, that steadiness matters: the samples change from track to track, but the pocket the two rappers work in stays recognisably theirs.

Where the Album Turns Inward

The second half is where the title starts to mean something. “Days Go By”, as Daily Campus describes it, is airy and dreamlike, built on breathy ad-libs, with Cordae rapping about witnessing violence in his neighbourhood and finding ways to escape it, and .Paak remembering the tough-guy front he used to keep bullies away. Two tracks later, “Days Like This” flips nostalgia into a victory lap, and The Arts Desk singled out a tightly written .Paak verse that swings between “all I ever wanted was to be the G.O.A.T.” and anxiety about his place in the industry.

“Crown” sets .Paak’s new home, furnished with luxury pieces and art, against memories of his parents’ house. “Helpless” turns to faith: Cordae takes responsibility for a relationship ending and learns that money does not buy happiness, while .Paak admits that providing for his family does not make up for absence. “Karma Tax”, in The Arts Desk’s reading, weighs what success has cost the pair and their peers. The closing title track ties it together, reflecting on the childhood memories that shaped them and the strain of balancing work with the people at home.

This is where the Step Brothers joke pays off. The film is about two grown men who refuse to grow up; the album is about two men who have had to.

How the Critics Heard It

Reviews have landed between warm and mixed. Daily Campus gave the album four out of five, calling it “extremely entertaining and concise” and concluding that “fans begged for this joint project for years and it lives up to the hype”. Mixtape Madness called it “a very, very solid rap project” and argued that the chemistry between the pair is its biggest strength. The Arts Desk was cooler, awarding three stars and describing an album that is “energetic but uneven”, fun and full of joy but sometimes let down by production choices in its first half.

What none of them dispute is the lineage the record is reaching for. For a site that tracks how soul, funk and rap feed each other, that is the interesting part: Heavy Is the Crown is a 2026 rap album that keeps pointing back to Bill Withers, to Biggie’s storytelling, to Ice Cube and to Common. The same pull towards the classic soul canon is visible at the other end of the generational line, as in our report on Stevie Wonder bringing Songs in the Key of Life to the stage in full.

For Anderson .Paak and Cordae, the album settles one question their fans had asked for years: whether the chemistry of their singles could hold a full record. For listeners following the lineage, it offers a sample map worth tracing back, one record at a time.

About The Author

Will Lisil

Founder of MW3.biz, building technology that empowers creators and democratising access to digital tools.

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