When it comes to new music from Frank Ocean, we’ll take what little we can get. Earlier this morning, Ocean used his Instagram story to share a snippet of a cover of SZA’s “The Weekend.” It’s brief, coming it at just 15 seconds, but it’s a predictably gorgeous take on SZA’s original version. Fingers crossed that it ends up as an official one-off single, in the vein of Ocean’s “Moon River” cover last year.
In his recent GQ cover story, Ocean provided some insight into how he chooses songs to cover:
Nowadays, I have to live with the song for a bit and I have to see if it’s worthwhile to interpret it first. To see what I can do with it, where I can insert my voice. In the past, I would just like a song and I wouldn’t think about it as seriously as when I do “Close to You” or “Moon River” or “At Your Best…” It’s much more deliberate than when I was just focused on the rap mixtape approach of taking a beat or flow, swapping the lyrics and performing it. The performance almost being the stream-of-consciousness, in-the-moment thing, whereas now I would much prefer having the song be with me for more time before I have to record it.
Hear the snippet of Ocean’s cover of “The Weekend” below.
Frank’s cover of @sza’s The Weekend pic.twitter.com/LAF3fzlksC
— Blonded. (@blondedocean) January 24, 2019
