Mac Miller’s narrative arc was genuinely surprising. A capable but derivative white rapper from Pittsburgh with neck tattoos, his early works about partying did not seem likely to trouble the zeitgeist in any lasting way.
The zeitgeist knew otherwise, however, and from 2011 to his untimely death by accidental overdose in September 2018, Miller built ambitiously on those bro-hop beginnings. Musically and thematically, he grew up in public. The Divine Feminine (2016) – the album that reflected Miller’s burgeoning relationship with Ariana Grande – revealed both softness and unexpected musicality.
On Swimming, the album he released in the wake of their breakup, shortly before his death, Miller – a multi-instrumentalist – wrote a horn part on a track called Ladders, and contemplated his own fissile brain chemistry with hard-won perspective. By this point, he counted the cream of the Los Angeles jazz and funk underground – Thundercat, Flying Lotus – as collaborators and friends, and was accepted as a fellow talent by some of the most verbally dexterous rappers in the game.
Circles is a desperately sad coda to this lotus-like blossoming. Necessarily it remains a work-in-progress, a companion album to Swimming licked into releasability by producer/composer Jon Brion with the blessing of Miller’s family. Having worked widely across genres and film, from Kanye West’s lane-swerving 2005 album Late Registration to 2017’s soundtrack for Lady Bird, Brion also co-produced significant chunks of Swimming.
Swimming and Circles were intended as a two-part project: “swimming in circles”. The themes – of moving in water, and futility – are intact; by contrast, Circles lacks the busy guest list that set Swimming apart. There was just no time for all that. Significant personnel include Wendy Melvoin from Prince’s Revolution on guitar or bass on a couple of tracks. Miller and Brion play almost everything else.
If Swimming felt contemplative, Circles feels even more like a singer-songwriter album than a hip-hop joint – a tendency most likely amplified by Brion’s treatments. Strangest of all is how much significant chunks sound like Beck on his most recent, very sad, album Hyperspace, or 2002’s Sea Change.
Genres play off against one another. That’s on Me is in waltz-time, a miniature of baroque Laurel Canyon pop. The musical mood is light, but the lyrics weigh heavy, going around in – well – circles: “That’s on me, I know, that’s on me, it’s all my fault.” Other tracks transmit Miller’s love for the solo John Lennon. Surprisingly, on Everybody, Miller covers Arthur Lee’s Everybody’s Gotta Live, an existential ballad from 1972 sung here as bluesman mumblecore, an approach Miller echoes on the title track. At the other end of the musical spectrum, the excellent Blue World interpolates a section of the Four Freshmen’s It’s a Blue World (incidentally, a formative influence for Brian Wilson’s exploration of harmonies). The barbershop intro paves the way for a looser hip-hop track, one with a spectacular bit of production: a Doppler-effect stutter ends up functioning as ersatz backing vocals.
Although Miller’s death was not suicide – three men have been charged with supplying adulterated drugs – many of the songs on Circles continue the bleak reckonings voiced on Swimming. They reflect on Miller’s wavering mental state; some even hint at untimely death, suggestions that have littered his work previously. Good News, released earlier this month, set the tone. “There’s a whole lot more for me waitin’ on the other side,” Miller sings, “I’m always wonderin’ if it feel like summer.”
It’s not all bleak. Anyone expecting an end-to-end downer will thrill at many of the funkier interludes on Circles. Complicated’s synth-funk suggests the Internet, or former collaborator Anderson .Paak; the languid anomie, however, is all Miller’s. Occasionally, a more playful 26-year-old surfaces. “I spent my life living with a lot of regrets,” Miller drawls wryly on Hands, another strong track. “You throw me off my high horse, probably fall to my death.” There are more zingers too. “I move carelessly, that’s why I’m always trippin’/I guess it’s like electrolytes, you help me go the distance,” Miller rhymes on Hand Me Downs, a key track, about craving family.
Mostly, though, Circles maintains its inward-looking holding pattern – sometimes to the point of mild irritation. There are issues here, with a man who appears to outsource so much responsibility for his own mental health. “All I ever needed was somebody with some reason who could keep me sane,” he sings on Hand Me Downs, while on I Can See, he rhymes: “I need somebody to save me before I drive myself crazy.”
But whatever this record’s levels of solipsism, everyone who ever worked with Miller concurred that he was both a generous friend and a genuine talent. Hardened rappers cried at his passing. “An angel,” was Grande’s final verdict, even in the wake of the wrongheaded abuse she suffered online, for allegedly not taking sufficient care of Miller. Circles functions like a carousel: not just round and round, but up and down. Mostly, the words here are of a man who, as per his Instagram handle, @92tilinfinity, intended to ride on for ever.
