Exchange

Album: Trapsoul (2015)
Charted: 26
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Songfacts®:

  • Bryson Tiller sings here of using his medium of music to reconnect with an old flame from college that has been thinking fondly about. He hopes she will give him another chance after hearing his song being played, and realizing he's singing to her.

    Tiller wrote in a Genius annotation: "That's real. A girl will be listening to something like "Don't" and I'll talk about her, and then she's like, "OK, I know he's talking about me."

    "And that girl – nobody even knows that we talk to each other. But, she knows out of all those people listening to the song, that message is resonating with her."
  • The beat was supplied by Florida production and songwriting duo The Mekanics, who consist of Michael "Foreign Teck" Hernandez and Rico "5 Star" Evans. Other productions on their resume include The Rich Gang's "50 Plates" and French Montana's "Lose It." Tiller recalled: "I just got the beat from my manager, from The Mechanics, and I was like, 'OK, this s--t dope.'"

    "Instantly it was like I gotta do something on it. It just felt like college to me, so I was just gonna stay in that realm and talk about a girl from college."
  • The Mekanics' beat samples K.P. & Envyi's 1998 hit "Swing My Way." "I heard the K.P. and Envyi sample before, but I didn't recognize it right away," Tiller admitted. "That wasn't a song that I always listened to."
  • Foreign Teck was initially planning to sample Ghost Town DJ's tune "My Boo" until he accidentally clicked on "Swing My Way" in a YouTube playlist and became engrossed with it.

    "How the f--k is mine gonna be different from everybody else's? So when I heard this sample, and all the extra, intricate things that I added to, the fills and whatnot. That's the only way I thought to create it," he told Genius.

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