Khalid Quotes

It is not about writing those hits again. I am sure I could write them, but it is about the sensibilities.

I started singing because it was a natural evolution in hip-hop to me. Without Prince, I wouldn't have embraced that. I wouldn't have been able to embrace me.

I really haven't strayed too far, musically, from my roots.

Albums are like diaries. You go through phases, technically and emotionally, and they reflect the state that you're in at the time.

When I was 19, I joined a rock band, and that's when I began to say, 'Okay, this is something that I could take seriously.' When I came to Minneapolis, it just refined everything.

After touring with David Bowie last year, I was inspired to look at what I wanted to do as an artist, and I realized I wanted to go back to the music I fell in love with when I was eight years old.

One of the greatest things about being an artist is, as you get older, if you keep working hard in relationship to what you want the world to be and how you want it to become, there is a history of interesting growth that resonates with different moments in your life.

For the last three years, I've been working on 'Bromst,' and that's all that encompassed my brain. And now that it's out, it will change the way that I think musically.

Music is a vital part of my life, and it has been since I was a kid. It helped me find my identity as a person, it helped me find my identity as an artist, and it helped me get in touch with emotions that I didn't know I had.

You write a song about how you think at the time, and then gradually you drift away from that, and when it's far enough in the past, that's when you think, 'Now I have to write something new.'

I was a cover artist for years. I didn't start writing songs until I was in my mid-twenties. I wrote them with John Leventhal, and they were pretty bad. I was in my late twenties when I wrote the first song with him that made any sense to me about what I was rooted in and what spoke for me as an artist. That was 'Diamond in the Rough.'

Even though I've been putting out bodies of work for years, 'Beauty Behind the Madness' felt like the beginning.

Every time you come out with an album or a song, you want to feel like you're growing a bit in what you are and giving people something that they can feel.

With 'Words, Words, Words,' that show was me experimenting with something, and then there was a clear direction for me.

I'm a late bloomer in music.

'99.9%' is the end product of years and years of me going through multiple styles and interests.

'Tongue' is literally just one piece of the puzzle. This album is something I've worked on over the course of my entire career and something I've been discovering myself in it.

I used to be mad, at first, that I couldn't sound like Ice Cube. And I think that was probably one of the best things for me.

There are people who compose from very young. That is not my case. I went discovering myself.

A lot of the songs that I wrote during 'Pt. 1' and 'Pt. 2' are the first songs that I ever wrote that sounded like that. I was in this phase - a certain creative space in my life - personally and musically.

My music would be very, very different if I haven't traveled.

I always grow, every album.

Mostly, I just write about feelings that people can relate to. Because, yeah, I don't know who I am, and this is not my sound forever... I'm a human, so hopefully, I will always develop.

I learned from my teachers but became through my music

I think the musical evolution I've gone through has come from all the work with the material.