Lewis Street is the combined release of what was originally announced as the first two singles from J. Cole’s The Fall Off.
On July 20, 2020, J. Cole published an essay titled “The Audacity” on the Players’ Tribune, in which he discussed several critical periods of his life and his current mentality. On the next day, he announced the imminent release of these two songs.
In May 2021, “The Climb Back” was unexpectedly relocated to Cole’s sixth album, The Off-Season.
Lewis Street is a street in Fayetteville, NC, Cole’s hometown, and is where he and his family lived until they moved to 2014 Forest Hills Drive. Cole discusses this in a December 2014 interview for NPR:
[…] we moved to this house on Lewis Street, which was this really tiny house. But compared to that neighborhood, it was amazing. And then my mom would eventually meet her boyfriend who would become my stepfather. And they got married, combined their two $30,000 incomes, and we’ve just entered another tax bracket. And then we moved to Forest Hills Drive.
This isn’t Cole’s first mention of Lewis Street; he previously shouted it out on his June 2013 song, “LAnd of the Snakes,” rapping:
This the shit I used to roll down Lewis Street with
The Lewis Street sign also appears in the credits booklet for 2014 Forest Hills Drive:
LEGENDARY.