Giveon

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”