Khalid’s Fiery Vision For “Heatstroke” | How It Went Down | Billboard
Khalid’s latest album, ‘Sincere,’ has a hot track, “Heatstroke.” See how he was inspired to write the fiery track from songwriting to the music video!
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00:00Hey what's up it's Khalid here and this is how it went down with my song Heatstroke.
00:12Heatstroke to me is a risk for me to take. I love genre bending. I love music. I'm a music
00:19listener. I'm a student and that was a genre that I hadn't dipped my toes in and I wanted
00:24to make sure that when I was writing this song that it felt real and it felt down to earth.
00:29Super fun working with John Hill. We really wanted to make something that brought me back to
00:36one of my favorite times of music and that is 2010s indie pop. When I record music I like to sit
00:42in a dimly lit room be by myself in the booth where I can close my eyes and I can disappear
00:49and although it might have been nearly winter when I when I wrote this song I close my eyes
00:56and I'm immediately on the water side at the beach in the middle of August.
01:10When I was writing Heatstroke I wanted to make sure that it felt authentic
01:14even before I knew that the name of the album was going to be called Sincere.
01:17Something about that moment freestyling a song it's like I couldn't stop myself from saying
01:23what if I told you. Heatstroke is a special song it's one of those songs that you finish in the
01:29moment and you leave and you don't think about it for a while and it comes back to you. I wrote
01:35that song in 2021 which seems like ages ago now but every time I listen to it I still feel the
01:43same way that I felt the moment that I wrote it. Heatstroke just so happens to be one of my favorite
01:47songs on my album. Conceptualizing the idea of the music video for Heatstroke has been really fun.
02:00I really wanted to portray a message and I wanted to speak about all the heat that we are all
02:06undergoing and hopefully when you watch the music video you'll feel impacted by it in some way.
02:12Heatstroke, fun fact, is the last song that I added onto the track list. I took two songs
02:18away for this song to bring it back. It's like it caught its way back to me.