Buffalove, Drake style
Drake doesn’t forget where he came from or how he made it back to Buffalo.
The Canadian rapper’s path includes five Grammy Awards, 29 Billboard Music Awards and 24 albums and mixtapes, and wound through Amherst – notably Daemen University.
“The second show that I ever did was in the lunchroom at a school called Daemen College in Buffalo, New York,” Drake told a capacity crowd Wednesday night at KeyBank Center. “I hold this place very near and dear to my heart, because you were one of the first people to ever support me.”
Drake performed for the first time in Buffalo since 2016, though he’s no stranger to Western New York. He also included a shoutout to Walden Galleria on his October 2023 track, “Away from Home.”
His first visit to the Buffalo area came in April 2009, when he performed at Daemen’s Springfest. The Wick Social Room hosted the show, and it’s immortalized in Drake’s 2021 song “The Remorse,” which chronicles his early days in music:
“Daemen College booking me to pull up and speak the facts.”
The audience may have known Drake – then an actor who went by his given name of Aubrey Graham – as “Jimmy Brooks” from the Canadian TV series “Degrassi: The Next Generation.”
Or they may have downloaded his mixtape, “So Far Gone,” released in February 2009.
His visit to Daemen came less than two months before his first hit, “Best I Ever Had,” was released as a single on June 16, 2009. It reached No. 2 on the US Billboard Hot 100 that year.
Drake has grown up. So has Daemen, which took on “university” status in March 2022. The Wick Social Room is now the John R. Yurtchuk Student Center.
Or as Drake said it: “All things change.”
What the cell?
Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown had to wait a few extra minutes on Tuesday before he could convene the Buffalo Urban Development Corp. board meeting.
That’s because he needed to have a quorum for the multitude of action…
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