Keshi: ‘Making Music is Central to My Being’
Vietnamese-American singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist keshi is known for his dreamy, lo-fi R&B sound blended with indie and hip-hop influences. He has come a long way from the time he uploaded music and became popular on SoundCloud. Keshi already has four EPs and two studio albums under his belt. The latest is Requiem, the deluxe version of which was released only this year.
Keshi has always gravitated toward music. He picked up the guitar when he was “11 or 12 years old” and just couldn’t let go.
“I just fell in love with the instrument. It was something that I couldn't be separated from,” he says in an interview with Esquire Philippines. “Anyone who has a really deep passion for something knows what I'm talking about, when you just can't put it down. Being able to learn the next thing and to progress, and to feel that progression was so exciting to me as a kid.”
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Keshi was only in high school when he heard John Mayer for the first time, and hoped that he, too, would be able to write songs that would stir one’s emotions the way Mayer’s songs did. If you’ve heard tracks like "like i need u" and "2 soon," you would have already experienced keshi’s delicate mix of airy vocals, intricate guitar melodies, and minimalist beats. His other musical heroes include American singer-songwriter Frank Ocean and Korean artist Dean.
While the former registered nurse has spent most of his life creating music and dreaming of having a career out of doing so, it wasn’t until he got signed to a record label in 2019 that he started believing that becoming a recording artist was viable for him.
“I was so scared that things were not going to pan out the way that I thought,” he says. “I was so unsure and unconfident in myself. It's just that impostor syndrome kind of thing happening. There was never a point in time where I or it thought, like, you know, I'm going to set out to be a recording artist. That wasn't, that was never the goal. The goal was just, I want to make music.”
Keshi needs no external motivation to make music. “It's just so central to my being, it's as essential as breathing to me. There's no reality in the future where I don't make music. I just feel I just kind of create, because I love it.”
An eager and participative audience never fails to drive keshi’s energy on stage. “I think the more involved the audiences, the better the show. Any artist or musician is able to give,” he said. “Not that an artist will ever give a bad show on purpose, but it's like, that reinforcement is actually so surprisingly influential on how an artist feels about himself on stage and they can really give their whole being as they’re performing.”
Requiem (Deluxe) has 17 tracks, and a single titled “Dream” is keshi’s absolute favorite at the moment. “I think it fits my definition of what I think a perfect song should be. it has a lot of emotion that's crammed into the most concise words.”
“I think that the melodies are perfectly balanced with the countermelodies in the production,” he adds. “And I think that it does this job of putting you into a world. A lot of times when you listen to music as a musician, it's easy to get caught up in like the technical aspects of the production or the chord progression or the vocal delivery, but when you listen to a song and you're instantly kind of transported into a space where you can't do anything but just listen–that's my favorite part about music.”
keshi will be performing “Dream” and other songs from his discography on March 4 at the SM MOA Arena. Tickets are available via LiveNation through this link.
