Encouragement

The Take

Track sixteen and the standard-edition closer of *Love Sick*, 'Encouragement' is DJ Dahi's second solo credit on the album (after track twelve's Charlie Wilson–featured 'If I Had'). Dahi — the Inglewood-born producer behind Kendrick's 'Money Trees' and Drake's 'Worst Behavior' — pulls the production toward a quieter, more spacious R&B register than the album's mid-tempo tracks. The lyric paraphrase: the title is taken at face value — Don's narrator is delivering the kind of pep-talk self-address that the album's emotional arc has earned by the time the closer arrives. The song chooses self-talk and motivation as its exit register, the inverse path to the betrayal/fakes verdict 'Bogus' delivered as the *Life of a Don* closer two years earlier. Inside the *Love Sick* sequence, 'Encouragement' performs the structural job of resolving the romantic-concept arc on a forward-looking note rather than a recriminatory one, and the deluxe edition's four additional tracks ('No Pole,' 'Embarrassed,' 'Geronimo,' 'Luckily I'm Having') functioned as bonus material rather than narrative continuation.