Mac Miller may be gone, but not only does his legacy live on, but it also seems his estate finds new ways to bring more Mac music to the masses. And while very little of it is strictly new, much of the material that has been released in recent years was either unavailable via DSPs or overlooked by skeptical listeners who were wrongly misled into boxing Malcolm in with so-called “frat rap.” One of his most overlooked collections of music was I Love Life, Thank You, which the Miller estate has announced made its way to DSPs today.
Originally released in October 2011, I Love Life, Thank You was Mac’s last mixtape ahead of releasing his debut album, Blue Slide Park, and so it may have unfairly received a little less attention than the star-making Best Day Ever, which peaked at No. 26 on the Billboard 200 (by contrast, I Love Life didn’t chart at all). The tape was the culmination of Mac’s “Road 2 a Million Fans” campaign, during which he released a new song for every 100,000 followers he gained on Twitter.
Of course, just a month later, he dropped Blue Slide Park, overshadowing the mixtape with its unprecedented success (it was the first independently-distributed debut album to top the Billboard 200 since 1995). Now, though, fans both old and new can revisit I Love Life and (re)discover that younger, more innocent Mac Miller from the precipice of his greatest successes. It’s worth taking a listen to, along with some of his other older mixtapes that have been re-released or posted to streamers.
Mac Miller is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.