Chance, in the course of a verse, a song, or an album, always seems to be stretching toward something new, something else. Photograph by Joseph Okpako / WireImage / Getty

The third mixtape by Chance the Rapper, “Coloring Book,” begins with the sound of a trumpet. Soon subtly harmonized, the horn (played by Chance’s constant sideman and alter-ego, Donnie Trumpet) teeters between controlled and offhanded play, tumbling almost accidentally into short, congested melismas. The impression is of an excited warmup, less an announcement than the happy hurry that precedes one. In this way, the trumpet is a kind of synecdoche for Chance’s ramplike gift: in the course of a verse, a song, or, here, the ecstatic whole of an album, he always seems to be stretching toward something new, something else. Chance is a funny, earnest, off-kilter lyricist, but his real power—this ability to always be building—rises from a level far beneath text. “Coloring Book” is, above all, a showcase for its creator’s preternatural understanding of the elements that make up a mood.

There is a taste of Chance’s knack for achieving what feels like travel—powered by an easy facility with melodic and tonal variation—in his now famous guest appearance on “Ultralight Beam,” the opener on Kanye West’s latest offering, “The Life of Pablo.” In that verse, Chance begins by singing plaintively, providing his own mini chorus: “When they come for you, I will shield your name / I will field their questions; I will feel your pain.” He is a better and more natural singer than Kanye and Drake, who are his forerunners in softening the borders between musical categories. On the track, enacting his own tender assurances, Chance hovers between a whisper and his full voice, saving a slight, fluttered vibrato for the end of each phrase. After the crooning, he breaks off into more straightforward rap, intensifying couplet by jokingly bragged couplet until, as if warded off by his proximity to a shout, he drops into song again, first cutely—“This little light of miiine / Glory be to God, yeah”—then in an open jubilee. When Chance reaches his final, exultant register, he tells us something we already know. “I’m just having fun with it,” he says, then, gratefully, “You know that a nigga was lost!”

“All We Got,” the horn-led first song of “Coloring Book,” feels like a sequel to “Ultralight Beam,” and not only because it is another collaboration with West. As the trumpet gives way to the crack of a drum machine, Chance vamps for a while, quietly sharing his version of domestic bliss: “Tryna turn my baby mamma to my fiancée / She like music, she from Houston like Auntie ’Yoncé.” Then, suddenly overtaken by love, he starts to bellow: “Man, my daughter couldn’t haaave a better mooother! / If she ever find another, he better love her / Man, I swear my life is perfect, I could merch it / If I die, I’ll probably cry at my own service.” Meanwhile, the horn honks keep coming, and when Kanye enters, auto-tuning the song’s chorus (“This is all we got / Isn’t this all we got? / So we might as well give it all we got”), he’s accompanied by sped-up samples of gospel hollers, the signature stylistic tic of his early beatmaking career. This is appropriate: just as West is Chance’s encouraging big brother and cheerleader (just the other day, on Twitter, he enthused, “Chance too good. God level bars”), West’s first album, “The College Dropout,” is a kind of mentor text to “Coloring Book,” especially in its insistence on a kinship between gospel and rap. But where Kanye’s devotion has always resembled the near-mystic inwardness and complexity of John’s Gospel, Chance is more like the apostles of Acts: he relentlessly, almost compulsively, evangelizes and invites.

The breadth of references in “Coloring Book” helps this attempt at inclusion along. At the end of “Blessings,” Chance injects snippets of the gospel artist Fred Hammond’s 1998 hit “Let the Praise Begin”: “Are you ready for your blessing? / Are you ready for your miracle?” Hammond is from the same generation as Kirk Franklin, a similar artist who has succeeded with young, semi-secular audiences, using the same genre-bending approach to composition and style. Chance’s nod in Hammond’s direction, and his showcasing of Franklin in the second half of the B-3 organ propulsed “Finish Line,” later in the tape, is an approving adoption of their strategically open arms. “How Great,” a cover of Chris Tomlin’s anthemic “How Great is Our God,” knowingly extends church music’s fluid movement between races and denominations. Songs by white artists like Tomlin and Hillsong (the musical arm of an Australian megachurch) have often been reinterpreted by black choirs, reversing the earlier exchange that gave birth to non-denominational “worship” music—the incorporation of the harmonic and rhythmic innovations of gospel acts like the late genius Andraé Crouch into the basic structures of pop-folk and arena rock. By including and cross-fertilizing so many distinct but related expressive modes, Chance adds yet another layer to this centuries-old interplay, ever so slightly widening its focus.

This ecumenical attitude—a preference for bright, yielding accessibility—seems to be the deeper meaning behind the piano-backed “Same Drugs,” a track that might be read as an interpretive key to the entire album. Ostensibly, the sweetly sad chronicle of a lost love, doomed by diverging interests—“When did you change? / Wendy, you’ve aged,” he says, using Peter Pan as an allegory—the song feels like a lament for the atomization of an entire society. Some of us have grown too old, too quickly. Read this way, “Coloring Book” offers listeners a diminishingly rare shared lens. “Here,” Chance offers, “see it my way for a while.”