“I was very upset, mad – the stages of grief,” he says. His parents separated when he was “very young,” he says, and when he was in second grade his father was killed: “He got hit by a car – drunk driver, didn’t stop.” By that point, Khalid was living in Germany with his mother, Linda, who recently retired as a sergeant first class in the U.S. When Khalid was about seven, his life veered into tragedy. “Moving makes me sad and excited at the same time – it’s a mind-fuck.” Today, he keeps the walls bare in his apartment, because, he says, “I get attached to things like that, and if I get attached, I won’t want to leave.” At the same time, he adds a moment later, he can’t sit still anywhere for long: “I always get restless and sad if I stay in one place – like, ‘I wanna see something else.'” I tell him that he seemingly just contradicted himself, and he nods. Before El Paso, he lived in Carthage, New York, a small town upstate before that, he lived in Heidelberg, Germany Georgia and Kentucky: He was an Army brat, and all the moving left a mark on him. A few months ago, he bought himself a pre-owned BMW 428i drop-top in El Paso, Texas, where he attended high school his senior year, and drove west to be closer to the music industry. He rents an apartment in Studio City, in the Valley.
Khalid is new to Los Angeles, but he’s already come to see the art at LACMA “a couple times,” posting shots of himself among the sculptures and paintings on his Instagram.
In a few months he’ll hit the road with Lorde, who called Khalid’s “Young, Dumb and Broke” “fucking gorgeous,” and whose music has a similarly potent combination of zoomed-in specificity and generational sweep. Khalid has appeared on tracks with Kendrick Lamar and Future, and he’s befriended Kylie Jenner, who gave his breakout hit, “Location,” a crucial boost when she played it on her Snapchat. American Teen debuted at Number Nine and is already certified gold. Technology references – cellphone photo albums, ride-share apps, GPS pins – pop up constantly, sometimes enabling connections, sometimes crippling them.
The album is full of fragile relationships – friends having a blast only to grow apart lovers yearning for one another only to get caught up in passive-aggressive mind games. His debut album, American Teen, came out a few months ago, and although it pulses with euphoric dance beats, Eighties synths and tales of marijuana-and booze-fueled high school raging, melancholy is never far away, either. Khalid is a 19-year-old pop prodigy with a lovely, leathery voice and a knack for big, breezy sing-songs.
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