Rat Race

This song finds Mineo giving his perspective on the ego game and ultimately meaningless pursuits that so many contemporary rappers get caught up in. He explained to Billboard magazine: "When I think about the lyrics to that record, the 'Rat Race' for me is the never-ending and unsatisfying pursuit of money, success, power, sex that our culture promotes as the pinnacle of success. Honestly, I feel like I'm free from those things because I know how empty they are, and I also just have a different definition of success… Success for me is faithfulness to what I set out to do, which was to help people have meaningful relationships with themselves, with other people and with God." "But what's very interesting too is that I'm a very 'successful rapper.' And I've never had to call a woman out of her name, I've never had to use foul language in my records or lie about who I am or pretend to be somebody else, and I haven't had to hide talking about what I care about most and for me … I guess it just empowers me to feel like I don't have to run the rat race, I don't have to play the games that hip-hop has to play in order for them to achieve this thing that I've already seen as empty anyways."

The song features John Bellion crooning the hook. The singer-songwriter has credits on a number of successful hit tunes, including writing the chorus to Eminem's "The Monster" and co-penning and co-producing Jason DeRulo's "Trumpets." Mineo told the story of how he hooked up with Bellion on this tune on a Genius annotation: "I was talking to Rob Markman and I said, who are some of your favorite artists you have now? And he was like Logic and Jon Bellion. Then I Googled Jon Bellion and some records came up and I was like: these are crazy! I was like who is this guy?" "So I looked him up on Twitter. He had like 30,000 followers – just kind of starting out. I was like, phewww, just tweet him. I was like 'Yo, you're stuff's dope, if you're in NY let's hook up.' Got a message, like a second later: 'Yo, I really appreciate what you stand for in your music. I love what you do. Love to connect. Follow me.'" "Then we just stayed connected after that. It's like we were more bonding as brothers. He's grown in his faith. So a lot of our conversations were revolving around that. And music was kind just an afterthought. Then I was out in California working on the album, and he was living out there, working on music. And he was only 30 minutes away or so, so I called him like 'Yo I'm out here if you want to come through. Let's work on a record.'"

The phrase "rat race" conjures up the image of the futile efforts of a lab rat trying to escape while running around a maze or in a wheel. It is used to describe an endless, self-defeating struggle to get ahead of one's rivals, particularly in professional and commercial occupations.