Giveon

I was doing unemployment for a little bit and then I started a dog-walking business in my neighborhood. I went to FedEx and started printing out some flyers and hung them up around my neighborhood. Then I started walking people's dogs for a couple months.

I would hope the first heartbreak anniversary is the only time you feel it, and then after that, you don't really even notice.

In the studio, I like to have the music first: I'll sit with the music for like an hour, on loop, and just let it tell me what it feels I should do.

I have such a personal life history with R&B - it's the first music I remember hearing, and it feels like a family tradition.

I think if you go back to the '60s and '70s, that music felt newer, you were hearing stories told for the first time.

To have the sound I have, to pretty much close out a festival, it's something I didn't see much of in school. It was always pop singers and rappers. It's so cool to see that space for R&B getting bigger.

For me to be able to experience Paris for the first time with Chanel was a dream come true. I loved the nostalgia of it all.

I think of my body of work as a story that flows and plays in my mind like a film.

The way I write, I need to tell the true story. I can't just make a story up. So I have to let the things happen to me and allow myself to work through my thoughts.

But looking back, whenever I'd perform or anything I always gave it my all, no matter what. Even if I didn't know what exactly music could lead to for me, I always believed in myself and had faith in my abilities.

I remember Gayle King popped up on the screen, wearing a green dress - I'll never forget it - to announce the best R&B album category and when she said my name I could not believe it. After that I closed my laptop. I didn't need to hear anything else.

My debut project was during a pandemic, so I was in the house and never got to see the people who listened.

My approach to writing is, it's either going to be a personal story about me and what I've personally been through, or it's going to be inspired by a friend.

Yeah, I used to write short stories at first, but once you work on something, you want to show people. My peers weren't interested in me reading 30-40 pages to them.

Recognize that you always have room to grow and that there is always going to be someone better than you and that you can learn a lot from those people.

Music is a diary. Sometimes people make music as if no one's going to hear it, as if they can just be completely honest. Things are a lot more acceptable said in a song than it would be in person. Art excuses a lot of things.

The hardest part is writing a song as a story. A song is so short and there are only so many words that every line has to hit. The words have to flow. You can't say certain words that sound weird next to each other, you can't repeat words too much.

My mom was born in the 70s, but grew up in the 90s, seeing all types of things. Because of her PTSD, she sheltered us from all of it as best as she could. There was a lot going on around us that we didn't even know because my mom kept us in a bubble.

I grew up in Long Beach during a transitional phase. It's a lot better now, but there was a time where it was the peak of gang culture. That's a crazy thing to be born into.

So I did a program with the Recording Academy, the Grammy Museum. So pretty much they take, like, one hundred kids during the summer and for a week or two every day they go over something different in music history. Then during the music history part of the program, they would just tell us about the different eras.

Like any black kid on a Sunday, your mom's cleaning the house to music. So that was, like, my very first memory. My mom having it in the background with incense lit.

Sometimes I'll have words or concepts written down before I have any type of music or anything. So when I have that, sometimes I just hear a beat and, if I feel like it'll match with the story that I have written down sonically, then I'll just pair them together.

I feel like at this point in the world of just creating anything, you're not going to be able to create anything new. I think the closest thing you're going to get to originality is a mixture of influences.

I love to write music, watch a Pixar film, or play video games with my family and friends.

In a film, there are dramatic moments and a bunch of different moments that lead up to a dramatic moment. On some songs, I try to paint the picture of before that drama happens, so by the time you get to the end of the project you've experienced infatuation and intimacy before it dives off to drama.