All We Got

Album: Coloring Book (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • Chance The Rapper kicks off his Coloring Book album with this gospelly track, which features a heavily distorted Kanye West on the hook.
  • The song also features the Chicago Children's Choir, who were founded in 1956 during the Civil Rights Movement. The collaboration was first birthed in 2013 when the CCC's President and Artistic Director Josephine Lee was introduced to Chance backstage at a James Blake show. A few years later producer/keyboardist Peter Cottontale, who is part of the creative group The Social Experiment, contacted Lee to bring in a few CCC members to collaborate on a few tracks. 15 members and a few alumni headed to a studio in Chicago to record vocals for this track, "How Great" and "Finish Line / Drown." "They just sent us clips of the tracks and I didn't even hear it all until we got into the studio," she recalled to Genius. "We didn't know Kanye was even going to be on 'All I Got' until after it was recorded."
  • Coloring Book debuted at #8 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, becoming the first streaming-exclusive set to reach the Top Ten of the list.
  • This wasn't the first song made for Coloring Book, but it ended up being the main idea for the project. Originally, "Finish Line" was slated to be the intro. Chance told Zane Lowe during an interview on Beats 1 Radio: "I'm glad that's not how [the sequencing] ended up being but that record is so much of the [project] because it talks about faith, it talks about there [being] other blessings in the world and on the album…But at the end of the day, music is what we have."
  • Kanye West did the drums for this song in one take and then freestyled over it.

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