Just a Little Sample is a bi-weekly column that takes a look at music through the relationship of songs and their respective samples.

By 2011, Drake was already a bonafide star, a pop/rap auteur with a tight grip on the millennial conscious, capable of vaulting whatever he put his hands on into the Hot 100. Less than a year after the release of his sophomore album Thank Me Later, which at the time of its release broke first week hip-hop sales records, he announced its follow-up. Titled Take Care, our first taste of what we might expect from what many now consider his best work came by way of a not-quite-single titled “Dreams Money Can Buy.”

The song itself is the type of chilly, nuanced Drake that fans have loved since he dropped So Far Gone in ’08. “Dreams Money Can Buy” is emblematic of the contradictory binaries that make Drake a distinctly human figure: here is a cocky and borderline egotistical Drake, but also one who is painfully unsure of himself; here is a Drake who begs women to pour out there hearts to him, but who can’t bring himself to do the same; here is a Drake suggesting that money and women are his only concerns, when everything he writes and sings suggests otherwise.

And yet, as acutely as “Dreams Money Can Buy” characterizes the totality of Drake the person and the artist — it didn’t make it onto Take Care at all. As written by Drake on the OVO blog: “[This is] not my single. Just a piece of my story.”

But regardless of how much it does deserve to be a part of Drake’s story, it has resisted traditional canonization. It’s not fair to say the song is forgotten, but it exists in a way that is distinctly twenty-first century: not catalogued on any official CD or medium anywhere, kept breathing only through a 2011 blogpost and various unofficial YouTube and Soundcloud pages.

It is fitting then that the song’s core sample comes from a figure whose entire mystique and social identity is characterized by this fleeting, ephemeral quality. Indie beat-maker Jai Paul has for years been the product of immense speculation and even confusion. But in 2011, Jai Paul was anything but evanescent. He was the guy, the emergent face in underground pop production. “BTSTU,” the song sampled here on “Dreams Money Can Buy,” launched his career in more ways than one, landing him a deal with XL, and finding him sampled not only on a Drake track, but a Beyonce track as well. The song also launched its own set of expectations for the young artist, which, at least from a perspective of industry success and sales metrics, have not quite been met.

“BTSTU” is an exercise in masterful, understated production, and its easy to see why it found its way into Drake’s hands. Drake’s longtime executive producer Noah “40” Shebib, was largely responsible for cultivating the aesthetic that became the signifiers of his early success, characterized by chilly synths and sharp drums. Noah is the listed producer here, and the way he chops up Paul’s sample retains much of the core melody that makes the original track a success. The repetition of the phrase “don’t fuck with me,” delivered in a high-pitched and distorted whimper, is a sort of challenge to and reversal of the archetypal braggadocios rap-hook, as it sounds more like a delicate plea than a volatile warning. The omission of the cacophonous synths from Paul’s original track reduce some of the original’s anxious sonic tones and instead makes way for Drake’s various insecurities to speak for themselves.

“Dreams Money Can Buy” is an odd little monument, especially five years after the fact. Here are two artists sharing the same sonic stage, struggling with fame and all the things that come along with it: Drake, reeling from the success, airing out his personal shit and not so humbly thinking out loud about his accomplishments; and Jai Paul, the new guy, still marked by uncertainty and apprehension. Life is full of unintentional ironies, coincidental occurrences, chance happenings — and music is no different.Of all the Drake songs post So Far Gone to remain virtually uncatalogued, of course it was this one. We haven’t heard a thing from Jai Paul since his own album leaked over three years ago and subsequently received no official release. There’s word of a new project. I’ll believe it when it’s here. For now, it’s hard to see Jai as anything more than some ghostly, fleeting apparition of what could be, imbuing whatever it is he touches with an air of ephemerality.