With you can get a nice microphone, you can get a nice laptop.

I think what’s so important about it is equipment. For me, coming up off of SoundCloud, if I had $10,000… I can just remember how excited I was doing my first show and getting an offer of $10,000. How valuable is $10,000 for an up-and-coming artist? Oh my God, $10,000. That to me is the most important part of every artist. Just how fun it was finding myself, and developing my sound. One thing I really appreciate about my life was my come-up story and all the work that I put in. I probably started writing around 10th grade, and I never really had the resources, so I didn't have the courage to believe that I could do it. Why was it important for you to team up with Reebok and help out a singer-songwriter with this opportunity? Back when I was an up-and-coming artist, I didn’t have the resources myself to really do what I was doing on my own. The interview, lightly edited for clarity, is below. Contestants can enter here by submitting a two-minute video or less, explaining what they want their legacy to be, plus a 60-second sample of them singing an original song.Ĭomplex got on the phone with Khalid to talk about his partnership with Reebok, the VMAs, working with 6LACK, his favorite songwriters, and more. The U.S.-only contest will give one singer-songwriter an opportunity to be mentored by Khalid and $10,000 to spend toward their music career. So he teamed up with Reebok for the Write Your Legacy contest, in honor of the launch of the Reebok Classic Leather Legacy. Khalid is proud of his come-up story and wants to help another artist with theirs. Streaming tallies, arena tours, and VMA nominations (he just picked up another two) aside, the star remains extraordinarily grounded, emphasizing that he stays with the same circle-often in the same town-and just makes music because he has the opportunity to do so.

Two of his biggest collaborations-“Lovely” with Billie Eilish and “Eastside” with Halsey and Benny Blanco-are among Spotify’s 100 most streamed songs ever. And more often than not, he doesn’t come alone. He’s Spotify’s tenth-most streamed male artist of all time and the youngest artist in history with over fifteen billion streams on the platform. There are few artists who, at such a young age, can rack up numbers like Khalid does.

I feel that same sort of inspiration I felt when I first started creating.” “I feel like I’m taking it back to the basics, kind of writing the album how I approached American Teen, and American Teen is so special to me. “I’m zoning in on my creativity,” he tells Complex. Khalid reminisces about his debut album fondly and even hints that he’s in the same headspace now as he was making the album that would earn him three Grammy nominations.

It’s been over a year since the release of his last project, Free Spirit, and three years since American Teen, the album that catapulted the El Paso native up streaming playlists and award show shortlists.

New khalid album