Khalid plays Billboard Canada THE STAGE at NXNE on June 12 at Sankofa Square in Toronto. Tickets are available here.
TikTok is a time machine. Hearing his songs on the app, Khalid finds himself in an earlier era.
Last February, the Billboard Hot 100-topping R&B and pop artist noticed one of his early hits was resurfacing. “Location” — which peaked at No. 16 in 2017 — was connecting with listeners all over again, who were singing along to the yearning lyrics about love in the digital age with a fresh perspective.
“It’s a whole new society, a whole new age of young adults who are experiencing this song,” Khalid says. “I lived it, and I performed it, but to see people who are now the age I was then listening to that song, it’s surreal, funny and nostalgic. It makes me live vicariously through that experience. I’m like, wow, there’s a reason why it resonates with them: because that was real.”
When he first wrote the song, Khalid was a teenager himself. A 17-year-old living in El Paso, Texas, he uploaded the track to SoundCloud without ever considering the impact the now-diamond-certified song might one day have on young lovelorn listeners a decade later.
“Turning 27 this year came with a lot of reflection on life,” he says. “I started to look back at where I was when I was 17. To be able to be in my career for as long as I have, to still have an impact, even to see things going viral on TikTok — I feel like that version of me 10 years ago would be so proud and so happy. And if you had told him all of [what would happen in the next 10 years]?” he says with a chuckle. “He wouldn’t have had a clue.”
Now fully cemented as an in-demand collaborator, global arena artist and reliably charting hit-maker, Khalid is ready to rediscover the innocent version of himself that he was before he found success.
He wants to be the most open and honest version of himself — not necessarily the serious and emotional version Khalid spent years of his life pouring into 2024’s Sincere, but one that is able to relax because he has fully embraced his own identity.
“Not just my moody side, but the fun side,” he says. “The flirty side.”
Blue Marble shirt, Bonnie & Clyde glasses.Joelle Grace Taylor
Though Sincere was a deeply personal album, there was one part of himself Khalid hadn’t quite revealed yet.
In November 2024, Khalid was outed by an ex-boyfriend. Though it’s not how he wanted to share that part of his identity with his fans, with a simple rainbow emoji he confirmed that he is gay and “not ashamed of [his] sexuality.’”
He was never hiding anything, he says, just protecting that part of his privacy. Stepping back onstage and seeing the reaction from his fans reaffirmed his open and honest approach to music.
“I had a moment where I walked out and I looked into the crowd, and I’m singing these songs that — I was obviously gay when I wrote them, but the world may not have known,” he recounts. “Everybody is singing them the same way they were before I was outed! So [that shows me] none of my fans care about my sexual preferences. I think they care about our mutual respect for music.”
He realized he didn’t have to keep finding ways to protect his privacy. It was a liberating experience, he says, seeing that very little had changed.
“Finding that freedom comes from knowing I can just be myself and still be embraced and appreciated,” he says. “That doesn’t change because the world finds out I’m gay. Because I don’t change because the world finds out I’m gay.”
Though artists express themselves through their music, the songs live their own lives. Once they’re out in the world, fans can project their own feelings and experiences onto them. In some ways, the music belongs to the listener as much as the artist.
After he came out, a fan pointed out that his 2022 song “Satellite” was already “an LGBTQ anthem.” In addition, “Better” has been used as a first dance at multiple weddings, and the 2017 song “Young Dumb & Broke” has become a staple at graduations. As listeners find meaning in the music, it takes on its own dimensions.
“When you’re an artist, you carry a responsibility,” Khalid says. “People will live to your music, people will die to your music, people will give birth, people will be reborn. There’s so much emotion involved in the exchange of music from artists to listeners.”
He uses “Young Dumb & Broke” as an example. The song’s universal experience of the feeling of invincibility of life in your teenage years has persisted from one generation to the next, which is something he would not have predicted.
“‘Young Dumb & Broke’ lasting as long as it has now would have never been anything I imagined, because when I made that song, I was so presently focused on being young, dumb and broke,” he says. “When I was singing that song at 19, I probably would have told you that I couldn’t wait to stop singing that song. Now, I love it.”
Khalid says he wants to inspire young Black men to be comfortable being open about their sexuality, but he doesn’t see the music as appealing to any specific kind of listener because of the identity of the person making it.
“Music is subjective,” he says. “If you place yourself in an experience, we can relate to people all across the board. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay, it doesn’t matter if you’re straight. We all have feelings and we all have emotions.”
Khalid is a major star of the streaming era. He has multiple songs in Spotify’s Billions Club (tracks with 1 billion streams), including “Location,” “Young Dumb & Broke” and “Lovely,” his collaboration with Billie Eilish. At his 2019 streaming peak, he spent some time as the most popular artist on the platform.
When he first started, though, those platforms were barely on his radar. Instead, he uploaded his first songs to SoundCloud, the streaming site where users once shared their own music and mixtapes — a popular platform for new musicians. There was very little thought to strategy or rollout.
“Naturally, that led to other apps like YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and so on. But that’s where it all started,” he recalls. “I remember being on the phone with a friend, like, ‘I’m about to upload my song to the internet.’ It felt so carefree back then — just making songs with my friends and throwing them online. Nobody could have imagined what streaming would become today.”
Though he couldn’t have predicted it, Khalid was uniquely positioned for the streaming era. He’s often categorized as an R&B singer, but he has a genre fluidity that has landed him on a diverse number of Billboard charts: Adult Contemporary, Latin, Rock & Alternative, Rap, Dance. He has a song for every playlist.
As a child, Khalid’s parents were in the Army and he often found himself moving around. He spent six years living in Germany when he was young, then spent some of his formative teen years from eighth grade until just before his senior year in upstate New York, just 20 minutes from the Canadian border.
“Being a military kid, I was like a sponge, just soaking in all the cultures around me,” he recounts. “When I was in northern New York, I got introduced to American folk music, which became a big part of my foundation as an artist and really shaped my songwriting. Then living in Germany exposed me to pop music from a different perspective. And coming from the South, R&B is definitely at my core. So all these different shades of music come together to make who I am.”
He’d moved to El Paso by the time he released his breakout 2017 debut album, American Teen, but it was inspired by his experiences growing up both there and at Fort Drum, just outside of Watertown, N.Y. Like so many other teenagers growing up outside of a major city, he spent a lot of time bored or partying — and dabbling in music.
“A lot of the stories that ended up inspiring American Teen came from that time in my life,” he recalls. “It was cold and kind of bleak, with not a whole lot to do — but there were definitely a lot of parties. At the time, it was fun and wild. Looking back now as an adult, I’m like, ‘Why did you get yourself into some of those situations?’ But honestly, it was the perfect setting for teenage angst — just growing up, facing challenges and mentally taking notes.”
His mother was restationed to El Paso before his senior year of high school, and he decided to go with her. Lonely and separated from his friends, he began writing songs and uploading them online. At the time, Right Hand Co.’s Courtney Stewart was managing a number of producers when he was introduced to Khalid through mutual friends on Twitter and heard some of his SoundCloud demos.
“He didn’t know it at the time, but he was writing a generational album in American Teen,” Stewart says. “As soon as I heard that voice and those lyrics, I was like, ‘This is incredible.’ It was something I had never heard before. His tone, the youthfulness of the lyrics and just how it made me feel. So I got on a plane and went and met with him.” (Khalid’s management team now includes Stewart, Mame Diagne, Jordan Holly and Relvyn Lopez at Right Hand.)
Other artists and producers have heard the same thing in his music. His ability to adapt to different sounds and his breadth of universal experiences has made him an ideal collaborator for everyone from J Balvin to Marshmello to Logic to Halsey.
Growing up near the Canadian border may also have endeared him to artists from the country. He’s collaborated with a number of Canadian artists, including Majid Jordan, Tate McRae, Shawn Mendes, Alessia Cara and Justin Bieber. He’s also made a big impact in the country, with 40 songs charting on the Canadian Hot 100.
Khalid says he loves collaborating, which brings the best attributes of two sounds together. Having another voice in the room can also let him get out of his own head, he says, and recognize when a song is a hit.
Most importantly, he’s sure enough in his own voice that no matter the genre he’s working in or the artist he’s performing with, he’s still recognizably Khalid.
“I think not losing sight and just trusting my voice has led me to be in any sound comfortably because I get to pull up as myself,” he says. “When you feel yourself on a track, you can’t fake it. It’s real.”
PDF top, pants and shoes; Gentle Monster glasses, Magdelena necklace, Rolex watch.Joelle Grace Taylor
Being rather private, Khalid worries he’s created an impression of himself as an introverted person. Now, he’s ready to bust that myth.
“I’m actually extremely extroverted,” he says. “I love to socialize, I love to hang out, I love to see new things and meet new people. I mean, my [2019] album was called Free Spirit, but I really do believe I am one. I made that album only to go into hiding afterward. I don’t feel like that’s very much freedom. But now, I feel like I do have my freedom.”
Embracing his full self has brought him back to the carefree headspace of his SoundCloud days — but with the experience and maturity of an established music career.
“I started off just having fun and when I gained a career, I started to take myself a little too seriously,” he admits. “I had my fair share of time to be serious. Now I don’t have a care in the world. I can just have fun.”
In a recently posted TikTok clip, Khalid is vibing to a snippet of an unreleased song on the streets of Manhattan. In a black hoodie and throwback raver pants and holding a black handbag, he dances along to a track that blends his signature mellow, wise-beyond-his-years vocals with a sound that evokes decadent early-2000s pop by Britney Spears or The Pussycat Dolls. Grinning ear to ear, he stops to take a quick photo with a fan. It takes only 15 seconds to see the comfort and excitement of his new chapter.
“My new era of music feels like I’m finally ready to be the artist I’ve always dreamt of being,” he says. “It goes back to the regressions of when I was a child — imagining myself and thinking, ‘I want to be this artist one day.’ Now I feel like I have the confidence to finally be that artist.”
Find more info on Khalid's upcoming Toronto performance here. Read Billboard Canada's other NXNE cover story on deadmau5 & REZZ here.
