What a Time to Be Alive and Future premiered the album on Beats 1 on OVO Sound's "OVO Sound Radio" show on September 20, 2015, and weeks after it was released on the iTunes Store and Apple Music. The Summer Sixteen Tour by Drake was made to support this mixtape. "What a Time to Be Alive" received generally positive reviews from music critics. The album received a normalized metascore of 70 out of 100 on the review aggregate website Metacritic based on 24 critics. "Billboard" described Drake and Future's chemistry as expected and said "Future deals with personal demons that he tries, and fails, to drown
When This Cruel War Is Over Confederate songwriter John Hill Hewitt to write an answer song, titled "When Upon the Field of Glory". A lyric sung to the same melody, called "When This Cruel Draft Is Over", lamented the plight of potential draftees, and later in the war, lyrics to this tune praising George McClellan, and championing him as a presidential candidate to succeed Abraham Lincoln, were written under the title "Shouting 'Mac' and Freedom". The tune also inspired one Sergeant Johnson of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry to write lyrics to the tune as a prisoner of war, entitled "Down in Charleston Jail". Other answer songs