| Home / College Guide / Khalid Talks High School Prom, Going Platinum, and Getting A New Puppy - Loud Ma |
| Posted on Wednesday, July 24 @ 00:00:17 PDT |
[By CARINA CHOCANO](https://theloudmagazine.com/detail/2666/Khalid-Talks-High-School-Prom,-Going-Platinum,-and-Getting-A-New-Puppy) [July 24, 2024](https://theloudmagazine.com/detail/2666/Khalid-Talks-High-School-Prom,-Going-Platinum,-and-Getting-A-New-Puppy) Getting elected prom king in El Paso is a big deal. Kids start angling for the honor in middle school, so when the singer-songwriter [Khalid](https://www.vogue.com/article/vmas-2017-khalid-best-new-artist-american-teen-style-mtv)—then just an eighteen-year-old recent transplant from New York—joined the fray, it rubbed a few of his classmates the wrong way. Khalid released some of his captivating, melodic songs online ahead of the big night and started getting the kind of music-industry attention not usually directed at high school seniors. After he was crowned, the prom queen refused to dance with him. “I stole their joy,” Khalid, now 20, tells me. His photo shoot has wrapped, and we’re sitting inside the wardrobe trailer at a beach just south of Los Angeles. It’s a golden late afternoon, and Khalid is smiling and avoiding my eyes, both kidding and not. “But I did it in a way I felt was deserving, because I’m a decent human being and not some superevil kid who just came in and was like, ‘Whoop! Now it’s mine!’ ” In the weeks following prom, the momentum behind his music continued to build.
On graduation day, Kylie Jenner, who has been known to boost artists from relative obscurity to the top of the charts, shared Khalid’s song “Location” on Snapchat. Within two weeks of her endorsement, the song blew up in El Paso. People began to recognize Khalid on the street. “When all of the celebrities started putting it on their Instagram,” Khalid’s mother, Linda Wolfe, tells me, “we knew that it was something.” The single now has more than 280 million plays on YouTube. As Khalid tells me the story of the prom coup and its aftermath, I recognize a paradoxical blend of bravado and hesitation, of confidence and shyness—you can see it in his demeanor and hear it in his music, which is rangy and expansive. His slightly melancholy songs have echoes of R&B, hip-hop, eighties synthesizer pop, and American folk music. He counts Fleetwood Mac, Father John Misty, and his mom (also a musician) among his influences. He tries to make it easy for people to like him, and yet, at the same time, there’s an undeniable grit and determination. You wouldn’t know it from its smoothly assured sound, but “Location,” a crooning ballad about courtship in the age of subtweets that has since gone platinum, emerged from a period of unease for Khalid.
His mom was a U.S. Army sergeant who also sang different kinds of music, and Khalid grew up moving every few years—from Atlanta to Kentucky and, after his mom joined the army band as a singer, to Germany and New York and finally El Paso. (Khalid’s father died when Khalid was in grade school.) “I think it was the hardest move for my kids,” Wolfe says. While there was no place they really thought of as home, “they were getting older. Khalid . . . had to go to a new school, a new culture, and make it work.” That summer after moving to Texas, Khalid felt lost. He had neglected to take the SAT or the ACT, so his chance of attending a college that appealed to him seemed unlikely. “I had a lot of time where I sat in an empty room and stared at my wall just thinking, What am I going to do with my life?” He missed his friends in New York. “All those people who tell you, ‘Oh, it’s not goodbye. It’s see you later.’ They stop texting you.” Then a car accident landed Khalid in the hospital, and while the incident wasn’t serious (or his fault—he was in the backseat), it made him think about how he was spending his time. “I just sat in that hospital bed and I thought, Damn, I need to do something to change the way my life is going.
” He started writing music—partly as therapy, he says. “My mom is extremely talented. I looked up to her and wanted to do what she was doing.” Khalid wrote throughout his senior year, pouring into his compositions the loneliness and longing—but also the exuberance and hope—of being a high-schooler. He began posting raw voice notes, captured with the voice-memo app on his phone, on Twitter. Then he recorded “Saved,” a melancholy “one that got away” ballad inspired by the girlfriend he had left behind in New York, in a garage studio in El Paso. Like “Location,” the song gestures to love and dating and the digital detritus of an expired relationship. (“But I’ll keep your number saved/’Cause I hope one day you’ll get the sense to call me,” Khalid sings.) “I would hear him singing in the bathroom—very, very, very loudly,” Wolfe tells me, “but I had no idea he was writing songs, that he had that capability, until he let me hear ‘Saved.’ ” Wolfe was floored. “I had a lazy son, you hear me? He was lazy.” The summer after graduation, Khalid tossed his clothes into a plastic tub and drove out to L.A. to finish recording what would become his debut album, American Teen, released in March 2017.
Perhaps unsurprising for someone with such a peripatetic childhood, he’s been on tour pretty much constantly since. Touring has helped Khalid shed some anxiety about performing. The trick, for him, is to look at every member of the audience and to try to make a connection—the perennial new-kid stance. A now-famous clip shows him jumping offstage while performing in Manchester, England, to hug a tearful little girl who was singing along to his lyrics.“I just had to show her appreciation,” he says. But Khalid admits that he’s a “completely different person” when he’s not in front of a crowd. “I like people to look at me as a regular guy who’s just involved in a super-rare job that kicks ass.” And offstage, he is beginning to put down roots. Recently he bought a four-bedroom house in L.A., and it’s clear that part of the appeal is that it’s a home for his guests as well. At any given time, he says, he has about three friends—from El Paso or even Germany—staying with him; more crash on the sofas. He has installed a video projector and a sound system to entertain them with. “I don’t know how to dance,” he claims. “But I’m learning.” During an upcoming break, he’s planned a trip to Dubai, Tokyo, and Greece for his friends and backup dancers.
When we last spoke, he’d recently added a nine-week-old puppy—a cocker spaniel–dachshund mix named Maui—to the household. “She’s in tour-training mode right now,” he tells me. She’s “gonna be a little monster.” The house itself he’s filled with reminders of El Paso—a mirror marked with the city’s area code—as well as some things that underline how far he’s come: clothing by Helmut Lang, Gucci, Comme des Garçons, Balenciaga, Cobra S.C., and Adaptation. Almost every shoe in his tour closet, he tells me, is made by Nike, except for Balenciaga Triple S sneakers and some beloved flip-flops from the same designer. An interior designer helped him figure out a scheme involving lots of pastels and a wall that’s painted like a sunset (“the perfect time of day”). Colors, in fact, seem of utmost importance to the singer—so central to his mode of thinking that I have to ask him if he has synesthesia. (Not really, he says.) But it’s clear that they are crucial to his understanding of himself and where he’s going next: “You know when you used to wake up for school and you would look outside your window and it’d be this weird dark blue?” he asks me.
The album he’s currently working on is like that: “It’s like I’m waking up into the new discovery of myself.” In this story: Sittings Editor: Lucinda Chambers. Grooming: Daronn Carr. Tailor: Hasmik Kourinian. Produced by Kiori Georgiadis at Hinoki Group.
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