death bed (coffee for your head)

“death bed (coffee for your head)” is the second track from Canadian rapper Powfu’s 2019 album, “Some Boring, Love Stories, Pt. 2”, which was released in February 2019. The track samples British-Filipino musician beabadoobee’s (Beatrice Laus) 2017 track, “coffee”.

In an interview in with music publication Genius.com, Powfu opened up about the inspiration and process behind “death bed (coffee for your head)”:

Genius: What inspired this song?

Powfu: I heard the beat about over a year ago now, so a long time ago, and I was just surfing SoundCloud. I was on a grind of making lo-fi hip-hop songs. So I came across this beat and I heard bebadoobee sample in it. I was like, this sounds sick. I didn’t even think of writing a rap to it originally, I just recorded it or I just wanted to listen to it freely. And then my friend is the one that actually told me to record vocals to it. So then I was like, sure, I’ll try it. So I tried it out and it actually started sounding pretty good, so I was like, I’ll keep going with it. So then I tried to write a rap for it. I listened to the hook and tried to make the lyrics go with the hook.

G: When did you realize the song was a hit?

P: To be honest, it took a while because the song was released on SoundCloud a year ago. And then I would say it was probably up for five months until it started getting traction slowly and the YouTube video of it that Promoting Sounds posted started getting more and more views. I was like, oh dang, it’s actually going really good. And then that was probably when Promoting Sounds started, it just started getting a crap ton of views on YouTube. Seeing it in different countries is crazy. I never, I never thought it would go out of Canada. But yeah, the States is in the lead right now. So that’s, that’s really cool. I feel like all the other countries kind of follow.

G: Why do you think people connect with the song?

P: I felt like people connected with it because of the lyrics mostly. I feel like the sound of it is cool too. It has a lo-fi, kind of catchy hook with it that goes throughout the whole song, which is also different. But yeah, the lyrics are pretty deep and I feel like everybody can relate to it at some point. I feel like the lyrics and then the catchy hook is what got people’s attention.

G: Where do you get songwriting inspiration?

P: I watch a lot of romantic movies like cringey stuff that Nicholas Sparks writes. But I love that stuff. So I’ll just sit in my room by myself, I’ll just watch movies and I’ll feel inspired by that and I’ll write about what the characters are feeling and stuff like that. And then also some of it is personal things that have happened to me with past relationships and stuff and current relationships as well.

There is currently no music video for the track, but the audio upload on Powfu’s YouTube channel has almost 2 million views. On Spotify, the song has almost 100 million streams.

Release Date: 9th February 2019

Songwriter/s: Beatrice Laus, Isaiah Faber & Oscar Lang

Producer: Otterpop

Label/s: Robots and Humans / Columbia

Chart Rankings: “death bed” has performed very well in the charts in 2020, reaching #13 in Australia, #58 on Austria, #5 and #24 on various charts in Belgium; #41 in Canada, #37 in the Czech Republic, #36 in Denmark, #9 in Finland, #83 in France, #41 in Germany, #19 in Ireland, #39 in Italy, #14 in Malaysia, #56 in the Netherlands, #11 in New Zealand, #14 in Norway, #106 in Portugal, #10 in Singapore, #47 in Slovakia, #20 in Sweden, #23 in Switzerland and the UK and #71, #39 and #86 on various US Billboard charts.

The lyrics to “death bed” can be viewed here: LINK