The victory lap Drake has been on since ending the dispute with Meek Mill has been something to behold—performances of “Back to Back” at concerts that had thousands of people shouting along with the words; the rise of “Hotline Bling” to the Billboard Top 10; the mixtape with Future that had rap fans losing their minds as soon it was rumored to be in the works. It’s a run that testifies to the third and most important thing Drake has going for him: he makes it really, really fun to be a Drake fan.

It’s fun to watch him get better at rapping. It’s fun to follow along with the arc of his prosperity as he clears rungs that were once impossible to imagine him clearing. Now when he releases a song in which he debuts a new flow—or appears on stage at an Apple Music event, or hosts Saturday Night Live, or premieres something exciting on OVO Sound Radio—there are people everywhere feeling happy for him, almost as if being on his team means they themselves have achieved something. (This good will can extend to Drake’s collaborators, too: in an email, Future told The FADER, “Drake is my brother. We have a cool personal relationship, but we have an even better relationship musically,” and Metro Boomin, in a phone interview, recalled the nightly dance-offs that he, Drake, and everyone else involved in What a Time to Be Alive would have in the studio to mixtape-opener “Digital Dash.” After the sessions concluded, Metro said, Drake sent a custom Bape couch to his house for his 22nd birthday.)

Drake’s relationship to his fans, and the mark he wants to leave on the world they live in, is something he has addressed more than once in his songs. I’m on a mission trying to shift the culture, as he put it on “Tuscan Leather.” Or, as he rapped on “From Time,” I want to take it deeper than money, pussy, vacation/ And influence a generation that’s lacking in patience. When I ask Drake what it would mean to actually do those things, I half-expect him to say something about getting young people to realize that the internet is ruining their ability to lead authentic lives. It’s a technophobic stance that he has hinted at before—even as he has demonstrated, over and over, an utterly fluent understanding of digital culture and how to harness it. But instead of being preachy in response to my question, Drake once again brings up his parents.

They’re what he thinks about when he pictures his legacy, he says—the way his mom talks about the songs she listened to as a young woman on a memorable trip to Italy, or how his dad describes the first time he saw The Rolling Stones. “I just want to be a time-marker for my generation,” Drake says. “Whatever my generation is—I’m 28, but I feel like maybe there’s kids right now, who are 16, that might still grow up with Drake.”

His choice of words here is revealing: Drake wants people to feel like they’ve grown up with him, like they know him and see him as a human being who is a part of their lives. “I watch other artists from the past in awe—in awe of the preparation it must have taken to, like, be that individual—the grandiose production of [it],” he says. “And I’ve sort of gotten by just being myself.”

That, more than anything, Drake tells me, is the mark he hopes to leave: “I just want to be remembered as somebody who was himself,” he tells me. “Not a product.”

It’s not a risk-free proposition. Because the truth is, people don’t like it when their friends change, and since Drake is intent on evolving, it’s inevitable that some fans will start identifying less with him and more with the spurned allies and ex-girlfriends whom he describes in his pettiest songs—the people in his life who resent him for drifting away from them or getting so big for his britches. The tough, guarded tone Drake took on If You’re Reading This has undoubtedly cost him the loyalty of some who were attached to the softer kind of openness that he became famous for—and his growing dominance as a star surely contributes to the type of Twitter fury he faced during the U.S. Open, and the glee with which some critics declared What a Time to Be Alive would have been better as a solo Future project.

Drake has acknowledged that the change in him is real. In “You & the 6,” the emotional centerpiece of If You’re Reading This, he talks to his mom on the phone, trying to explain to her how his life is different now, and how people around him are trying to undermine him because of his status. “I can’t be out here being vulnerable, mama,” he tells her.

As our interview wraps up, I ask Drake whether he actually feels that way—and what he imagines he will be, in the Views From the 6 era and beyond, if he toughens up so much that he loses the approachability that has always distinguished him.

“It’s never about toughening up. I don’t even know if that’s, like, cool, being tough and shit,” he says. “Not being vulnerable is never gonna be my thing. I’m always going to share with you what’s going on in my life.”

What has changed, he explains, is that he doesn’t have any doubts left about how good he is, or whether he deserves the spot he has fought to secure since emerging into the public consciousness six years ago as a beguiling, expressive misfit.

“Vulnerability, to me, sometimes comes in the form of being naïve about where I am in the pecking order of all this,” he says. “So I think I realize where I’m at now. And I think I realize that I’m gonna have to be OK with not having that many friends that are peers.”

And with that, Drake is out—done talking, and ready, at long last, to head to the studio, where he says he and 40 will be trying to wrap the third verse of a song they initially thought might work as the opener for Views, but now aren’t so sure. Drake seems confident they’ll figure it out though. He’s looking forward to doing the work.