I was planning on the finale of my favorite albums of 2016 with my favorite soul albums but truthfully, I got distracted by my Nintendo Switch and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild coming in today, but I didn’t forget you guys. So, I am sharing one song I’ve had on repeat for days.
18-year old Khalid from El Paso, Texas has miraculously appeared on my radar after a SoundCloud shuffle to his song Location and I haven’t stopped playing it since.
It’s a warm and alluring song about getting your significant person to send their location so you can meet up and spend “time”. It’s youthful, relatable, and so easy to sing the entire chorus forty times before your realize. Khalid has a well seasoned voice that’s less morose than Anthony Hamilton, more natural than Aloe Blacc, and somewhere in between polished and completely spontaneous. Reminiscent singers seems to be a new trend from Texas (I’m looking at you Leon Bridges) because he harkens back to the late 70’s early 80’s with his music and marketing (not rap 80s, more Bruce Springsteen 80s).
His album American Teen just released and even though I haven’t given it a full spin, it’s different. He will definitely have a career being the soundtrack to many teenage romance movies and I’m not mad at him. He speaks on subtweets, social media love, being a hopeless romantic, broke, young, and all the prerequisite emotions you go through leaving high school into adulthood. I’m interested in seeing where he is a year from now and if he will earn a last name or something. He’s so hard to Google without a song title. Either way, his album just dropped, so give it a listen and tell me what you think while I play Location on repeat.
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