High for Hours

Producer Elite spoke about the song in an interview with DJBooth saying:

That one, we were on the Forest Hills Drive tour. Me and Cam [O’bi]—he’s amazing, he’s done a lot of stuff for Chance The Rapper and Noname—were on the tour bus making beats. Cole was in his hotel room, he texted me like, ‘I need a beat.’ He was writing to some instrumental, I forgot what it was but it was a song that was already out. He was like, ‘I need a beat in this tempo.’

So me and Cam started coming up with stuff, working on drums and basslines, just trying to achieve a similar feel to what he was describing to us. We hadn’t heard the verses, though. Maybe like an hour later, he came on the bus and heard what we were doing, gave us a little guidance as far as what to change. He actually had five verses to that song—he was talking about similar stuff—but we all decided like, ‘alright, maybe you don’t need these two, I think people get the point’ [laughs]. Once he gets in the zone, he keeps going, that’s the thing.

That was a song that had been sitting around for a while. It was considered for the album but it didn’t fit the narrative, so we held off on it and decided to throw it out there before Obama left office, so it still kinda had some relevancy.

Writing for Odyssey, Paul Watson Jr. called the track an "emotional journey" saying, "From a personal perspective, this four-and-a-half minute, three-verse song took me on a roller coaster of different emotional synapses, which isn’t by any means uncharacteristic of Cole. What was interesting, however, was the cerebral approach to lyrics Cole took, which is usually a trait attributed to Kendrick Lamar, while simultaneously maintaining his characteristic simplicity."[3]