Milestones: Best Day Ever by Mac Miller

A 19-year-old from Pittsburgh raps like he’s already won, and on this 2011 mixtape, he nearly convinces you.

Courtesy of Rostrum Records.

Pittsburgh had exactly two rappers the rest of the country paid attention to, and both of them recorded at the same studio. ID Labs, a small operation run by engineer and producer E. Dan, had already shepherded Wiz Khalifa from regional curiosity to national weed-rap figurehead with Kush & OJ the year prior. Now the building’s other regular was demanding his turn. Malcolm McCormick, Mac Miller, was 19, freshly named to XXL’s Freshman Class alongside Kendrick Lamar and Meek Mill, and operating with the manic confidence of someone who’d been rapping since he was 15 and couldn’t fathom a ceiling. His previous tape, K.I.D.S., had blown up on DatPiff through word-of-mouth and relentless YouTube uploads at a time when both platforms still felt like open territory. Over 20,000 people joined a live video stream before Best Day Ever dropped on March 11, 2011. For a teenager without radio play, without a major label, without a single mainstream feature, that number was absurd. He’d built the audience himself, one free download at a time, and he wanted everybody watching when the follow-up hit.

The title track announces itself with a sample that has no business working as well as it does. E. Dan had been driving around Pittsburgh listening to M83’s “Beauties Can Die” when he realized the song’s swelling synths locked perfectly to a tempo Mac had already recorded vocals over. He pitched the sample slightly, dropped it underneath Miller’s existing bars, and that was the intro. Done in an afternoon. Mac raps about his engine never quitting, refusing days off, a relentless schedule that barely pauses for sleep. These aren’t deep observations. He’s 19 and bragging about his work ethic like a kid showing you his report card. But the M83 lift gives his words a helium boost they wouldn’t otherwise have, and a teenager who sounds genuinely stunned that people are showing up to his concerts is hard to resist. When he says he never thought life could be this sweet, he sells it through sheer vocal giddiness.

For the track “Donald Trump,” it came together on the last night of recording. SAP, a producer from Delaware, rode an eight-hour train to Pittsburgh with a chopped Sufjan Stevens sample from “Vesuvius” already sitting in his files. He started building the beat in the studio and Mac wrote to it in real time, finishing the track before the session ended. The name was a coin-flip decision—Miller asked his team whether he should call the song “Take Over the World” or “Donald Trump,” and they went with the punchier title because, in 2011, Trump was just a shorthand for gaudy wealth, not a political lightning rod. The Sufjan interpolation does most of the heavy lifting, those skipping electronic figures giving the track a buoyancy that carries Miller’s rapid-fire boasts about money and sold-out shows.

His verses cycle through wanting to take over the world, never looking back, wanting his money to reach a point where he can buy everything he sees. None of these thoughts break new ground in rap, and Miller knows it. There’s a winking quality to his delivery, a half-grin you can hear, that keeps the song from sounding like a kid who actually believes he’s Donald Trump. He’s playing dress-up in someone else’s ambition, and the song’s genius is how fun that dress-up sounds. “Get Up,” produced by Teddy Roxpin, sits right before “Donald Trump” on the tracklist and serves as its looser, less polished cousin, a two-and-a-half-minute burst of Miller insisting he’s awake, he’s moving, he’s ready. The Giorgio Moroder writing credit hints at where the synth-forward production pulls from, and Mac rides it with a caffeine-jolt energy that compensates for verses that don’t stick around long enough to register.

The goofier stretches of Best Day Ever reveal both Miller’s personality and his limitations. “Oy Vey” started when Mac blurted the phrase at Big Jerm during a studio disagreement with more little-brother annoyance than religious exclamation, and the two turned it into a hook. The song samples The Blow’s “True Affection,” and Miller raps about buying his mother a house, getting fresher every day, and provoking double-takes from doubters. He bounces between cartoonish and earnest. He imagines a future where he’s rich enough to afford anything, but he’ll still sleep on the couch, and that image, a millionaire napping in the living room, has a sweetness that his generic money bars don’t. “Wear My Hat,” a Chuck Inglish joint from The Cool Kids, pulls from a different pocket entirely, with Inglish’s beat giving Miller a bouncier, slightly off-kilter platform. Mac fills the four minutes on his style, his grind, his indifference to haters, and the song runs noticeably long for how little of substance he’s saying. Inglish deserves better verses than what he gets here, and you can feel the track coasting on vibe once Mac exhausts his handful of ideas around the two-minute mark.

“I’ll Be There” shifts the entire temperature. Producers Beanz N Kornbread had the song finished (beat, demo hook, everything) six months before they sent it to Miller. Of the eight or nine instrumentals they pitched, Mac picked this one, a gentle chop of The Impressions’ “People Get Ready” that Curtis Mayfield would’ve recognized immediately. Mac enlisted Phonte of Little Brother to re-sing the hook from the producers’ demo, and Phonte’s polished voice drops the tape’s energy into something warmer and more domestic.

Miller raps about being six years old and hearing his mother tell him he could do anything, taking her for granted, learning that family is the barrier between himself and losing his mind. None of that is especially sophisticated, but it doesn’t need to be. They’re a 19-year-old’s attempt to slow down and say thank you in the middle of a project built on acceleration. His delivery gets quieter, less performative. He’s not shouting at a crowd. He’s talking to one person. “Life Ain’t Easy,” an ID Labs track, occupies similar emotional territory but does less with it, running through the obligatory rags-to-riches arc that most young rappers include on mixtapes as proof they’ve struggled. Mac covers growing up without much, grinding for what he has, but the writing stays too general to land with the specificity that “I’ll Be There” manages. You hear a young rapper performing the idea of hardship rather than describing anything he actually lived through, and the song loses conviction because of it.

The mid-section of the tape tests how long Miller’s optimism can sustain your attention before you need him to say something surprising. “All Around the World,” produced by Just Blaze, has the biggest-sounding beat on the project, with booming drums and a MSTRKRFT sample giving Mac a stadium-sized canvas. He rises to meet the production’s scale with verses on traveling, performing, and feeling unstoppable, and his excitement is contagious enough to paper over lyrics that mostly repeat what he’s already said three songs earlier. “She Said,” helmed by Khrysis—one of the 9th Wonder-adjacent North Carolina producers Miller idolized—lets Mac rap about a girl over a soulful beat, and it’s one of the few moments where he tries to write about someone besides himself. The song is slight but pleasant, Miller sketching a relationship in broad strokes without attempting anything too detailed.

But “Wake Up,” co-produced by SAP and ID Labs, has this hook that lodges itself in your head and verses where Miller sounds most comfortable switching between quick bursts and longer phrases. The verses circle waking up and feeling like his dreams are actually happening, and on a tape called Best Day Ever, that repetition of disbelief becomes a kind of emotional through-line—not because he planned it that way, but because at 19, he simply couldn’t process his own success quickly enough to find different ways to describe it.

Where the tape sags is in its middle-to-late run. “Down the Rabbit Hole,” “In the Air,” and “Play Ya Cards Right” all provide serviceable beats and forgettable verses. Miller doesn’t falter on any of them, exactly, but he comes off like he’s filling space, stacking sixteen tracks because sixteen tracks signaled ambition in 2011’s mixtape economy. “Snooze,” another ID Labs cut, recovers some ground with a hook that captures the lazy satisfaction of someone who’s earned the right to sleep in, and Miller sounds noticeably relaxed, not performing relaxation. The tape’s sequencing front-loads its best material and lets the energy drain gradually, which works if you’re playing it at a party. By the time the weaker songs arrive, nobody’s paying close enough attention to care.

“Keep Floatin’” brings Wiz Khalifa into the fold, and the feature has a funny origin: Big Jerm had produced the track and Wiz recorded his hook for Rolling Papers, but the song got shelved. When Mac needed a Wiz collaboration, Jerm dug it up. It’s a weed song through and through—Mac and Wiz trade bars about smoking, floating, the specifics of being high, and their chemistry feels unforced. They grew up in the same studio, signed to the same label, and they rap together like two people who’ve spent hundreds of hours in the same room. Wiz’s drawl complements Miller’s quicker cadence, and the song coasts on that contrast without either rapper trying too hard.

Then the tape fakes an ending as “Keep Floatin’” drifts out, and just when you think it’s finished, small synthesizer tones pull you back into “BDE Bonus.” This is the sleeper. Big Jerm’s Earth, Wind & Fire chop from the funk band’s “Power” into something mellowed-out and Sunday-morning calm, with E. Dan adding live bass underneath. Mac sings and raps the same lyrics from the opener, but everything around him has changed. Where the M83-powered intro felt like a countdown to launch, the bonus track feels like sitting on a porch after the show, replaying the night in your head. Same words, completely different weight. When he says he never thought life could be this sweet, you hear it differently now—less as hype, more as a teenager catching his breath and realizing none of this is guaranteed.

Great (★★★★☆)