Khamari Unravels The Complexities of Humanity on His Sophomore Album, To Dry A Tear

Image credit : Shamaal Bloodman

Having quietly evolved into one of the most compelling new voices in contemporary R&B, Boston-born,Los Angeles-based artist Khamari has released his second full length album, To Dry A Tear. Known to merge soulful roots with alternative textures and depth, Khamari has manufactured a sound that is as raw as it is musically refined and forward-looking. His 2020 debut Eldorado was followed by 2023’s critically acclaimed A Brief Nirvana, granting him praise for his introspective lyricism, amassing over 130 million streams with standout tracks “Doctor, My Eyes” and “These Four Walls". With a musical appreciation for that of the soul of D’Angelo and Stevie Wonder, all the way to alternative indie and rock influences such as Jeff Buckley, and The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Khamari's artistry is informed by a deep sonic exploration that is manifested within his newest release.

To Dry A Tear is an eleven-track record, marked as boldly by sound as it is storytelling. After giving a glimpse into his new musical era with the release of notable singles ‘Head In A Jar’, ‘Sycamore Tree’, and ‘Lonely In The Jungle ', the LA - based artist unveils eight more tracks that complete the record, cementing his place as one of the most promising voices the industry has seen in recent times.  Stepping outside of himself to inhabit new characters and perspectives, Khamari examines the fractures and brokenness of different experiences which allow him to paint a complete and honest portrait of the human experience. The album’s heartaching opener ‘I Love Lucy’ explores settlement, countering ‘Head In A Jar’, a collection of thoughts of longing, while tracks like ‘Euphoria’ and ‘Lord Forgive Me’ highlight the album's expansive sound and dynamic production. Set against a backdrop of striking visuals that deepen the album’s impact to cinematic dimensions, each track is a vignette stitched into the fabric of a wider narrative that traces the intricate tapestry of the human experience.

Decadent with with richer textures, vocal ambition, and a fearless commitment to vulnerability, To Dry A Tear is an album that pulls a listener in different directions - a into spaces of introspection, towards places to sit with longing, and through bursts of clarity that feel almost cinematic in their emotional weight. In the quiet ache of the potent lyricism and warm melodies that adorn this album, there is healing to be found, and Khamari's latest offering is a quiet reminder that while pain might linger for a while, tears will eventually be dried.

Walk me through where you’ve been artistically since releasing A Brief Nirvana. 

I always perceived artistic choice as a spectrum, and something that you can control. This album was largely a process of realising that you have no control over a lot of the artistic choices that you’ll make - it's just a natural growth of your taste.

Between the last album and this one, I’ve spent time thinking I knew where I wanted to go, and figured out that I can’t really control not being able to get to a certain place yet. At times I’d realise I was going in a completely different direction, and learnt that creating is about collecting things and creating a collage of things you like along the way.

As an artist it’s easy to feel like there's a certain direction that you’re headed in after you finish a project -  and then you realise you actually have no control over where you’re going.

On the opening track, ‘I love Lucy’, there's a bit of a subverted strength in not being able to cut someone loose, and instead putting up with commitment. There's also a recurring theme of ‘rolling stones’ . Is there anything else in your creative process that has felt like it didn’t settle? 

Interestingly enough, I went through a lot with that song. It’s a song that I’ve always felt connected to. Sometimes in my process of writing or being creative, I’ll find that I know that something's not right. Sometimes I’d write a hook for a song and not realise until six months later that the same hook could be used with another verse I had written. Or the same with a beat I made. It’s like frankensteining things together.

That’s what happened with ‘I Love Lucy’ -  there were some things from other songs that I’d written that didn't make it to other projects that I really liked, and  sat with for a long time, knowing I still wanted to use them. Those ideas all fused together to create a picture within this story that you see in the way that the song unfolds.

A part of this process has been trying to make peace with that too - being okay with the fact that my process is abnormal. Even for people that have an abnormal process. I always expected that at some point, as I got better at making music, things would consolidate themselves into a more black and white picture where I know what the process looks like and how long things should take, when to sit down, when to clock in and out. As I’ve grown as an artist, I’ve learnt that that's just not the case.

I’ve had to learn to be okay with that kind of instability - succumbing to the process that every time you sit down it's going to look different. That's the magic of doing it, but it's also the thing that's difficult about it too. That's also just life though.

Do you struggle with trying to recreate and chase the feeling of making something you have made before?

I struggled with it briefly, but I quickly realised that it was a futile effort. As an artist, I don't want to recreate the same thing more than once. If people appreciate it, that’s good - I can make something else they appreciate in a different way.

If they don't appreciate it - there’s probably a reason as to why. With music I like that I've put out before, I’ve struggled with knowing something is dope and wanting to create more music like it  - and then I always realise that there's so many more stories to tell. 

'Acres' - is the theme of surveillance prevalent on this song? 

Acres was inspired by a lot of the Marvin Gaye era musicality and storytelling. That song for me, is about wanting more for yourself, but also the realisation that we all want more for ourselves. 

Coming out here to LA to pursue something as interesting and unique as music has been an eye opening experience for me because I’ve realised while meeting people along the way, that my story isn't as unique as I thought.

Even if you’re not pursuing music, everybody is pursuing something. We all want more for ourselves and our families - we’re all a little stressed out, and we’re all dealing with things that are preventing us from achieving what we want.

Me telling that story through the lens of waking up one morning and going about my day and experiencing what I’ve experienced in LA, was dope to use the dichotomy of running into someone less fortunate, asking for assistance. I've been exposed to situations like that in my life in different ways, but when you come to LA and experience it, it can be a little bit of a culture shock. 

It’s just another layer of me using another lens to perceive the story, because if I just tell a story from my perspective, it won’t hit as hard. 

You've said that this is an era where everything is more 'electronic and produced', and how it's important to you to keep your pace. What was it like to match your personal stories with the right collaborators, and how cautious are you about that?

Very. I knew I wanted to be part of the production process, but I don’t know if I realised how much I would want to have my hands on the wheel. I’m a control freak, but I didn’t realise how much that would translate into music. I’ve had partners in the past that I’ve worked with who have helped guide me in terms of direction and offering their complimentary skill sets - when I couldn’t do certain things, they would help me fill in the gaps. 

I’ve always looked up to artists  like J. Cole, Kanye, Prince, Miguel, Frank - all these people that are very intertwined from the very beginning - from the inception of a song to when the album comes out. So I’m very guarded about who I let into that process and when.

I realised with this project that I have to be very hands on - only you hear things the way you hear them, and you can’t put that into someone else’s head, because that vision has come from your experience in life and everything that you’ve been exposed to along the way. It’s really important for me to find the right people that share the enthusiasm of getting to that place.

And it’s not necessarily a matter of proximity. It’s an unspoken level of understanding. You can be really close to someone, and they can still get sick of you. As an artist especially, it’s hard when you’re really close with someone, and the issue is not that they don’t get the vision - but that they’ve been on the ride so long with you. It’s very important to me to find people that are willing to leave no stone unturned in making sure that everything that you get is everything you wanted, or at least as close to the vision as possible.

I know that you write alone a lot. You began making a lot of these songs solo, from the sanctuary of your living room, with just thoughts and keys. When bringing material to collaborators, does it amaze you how the quality of your ideas can improve when the right people add to them, or do you ever wish you kept things to yourself?

It goes both ways. Sometimes you bring people into the mix and you’re like ‘I couldn’t have seen things that way’, and sometimes it’s more of a ‘I should’ve kept that to myself’ feeling. It’s not a one size fits all, and it’s trial and error. It’s good to experience giving the idea to somebody because then you realise that maybe the way you had it was right, or because of what they try, you’re able to see the direction you want to take the music in clearer.

There's a contrast between ‘I Love Lucy' and 'Head In A Jar’ . ‘I Love Lucy ' explores being a rolling stone and themes of settlement and roots, while ‘Head In A Jar ' is about not being as close to someone as you’d like. A dichotomy, but both songs still exist on the same project. Talk to me about any other dichotomies in the creation process that needed to exist for the album to come to fruition.

The one thing that all the projects I listen to that I really respect have in common is that they’re all very contradicting manifestations of whatever's going through the person's head at the time -  because it's supposed to be human.

Nobody is black and white, and the thoughts and feelings we have, as much as we want them to be, aren’t set in stone. There’s probably a lot more things that contradict one another on the project, even outside of those two songs. But that's because I wanted to create something that was really human, honest, and true to where I am as a person, and that sometimes contradicts where I was yesterday.

You didn’t seek out contemporary music by his newer influences like Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole until after leaving college. On A Brief Nirvana, you took inspiration from artists like Nina Simone, Al Green, and Darondo. With this album, did you take a different approach? 

With this album, I was less afraid to be musical and build things myself from the ground up. And less afraid to follow my natural instincts in terms of where the songwriting process can take me. That includes instrumentation, and the landscape that you can build with sound and production and how that feeds into the storytelling too - I was very inspired by Lauryn Hill and a lot of Soul singers who were influencers on the last album. There were also some alternative inspirations too - The Chilli Peppers, Jeff Buckley, The Killers, The Strokes, and Al Green - I have a wide range of music that is inspiring me to pull from. I was more willing to accept those things as parts of my personality and bring them out in ways that felt real and raw to me. 

On ‘It's A Mad World’, you speak about how we’re all ‘Candles hoping to burn another night’ - speak to me about burnout and your relationship with it as an artist. 

Everyone will have their own interpretation of that line - we live in a world where, even outside of music, everything is so produced, quantized and manufactured - we’re all burnt out, a little tired, and exhausted from having things shoved in our face all of the time. That line, though you could read it many ways, can also just be an acknowledgement of that. I think part of the reason why it takes me so long to create something that comes close to the quality that I try to hold myself to, is because I do deal with burnout. I can go six months and not write a single song because I’ve written a song every single day previously for a year, and I’m exhausted and don’t really know what I have to say that will be interesting to someone else.

Sometimes you’ve heard a song a million times and you don’t know how to spin it anymore, even though you don’t have the right version. It’s a push and pull, and especially because of the amount of work I do on my own, it can be tricky. Learning to do that dance before knowing when it’s time to go, and knowing when to give myself time to relax and take some space so I have perspective can be very helpful - but burnout is something I have definitely dealt with.

On ‘Apollo Eighteen’, you delve into how living in this world isn't a permanent fixture. The movie with the same title (though not an inspiration for the song)  presents us with an alternate history where the cancelled Apollo Eighteen mission actually happened. Do you ever think about a world in which you didn't pursue your musical calling? 

No. It sounds cliché but you can’t really have a backup plan. Not that nobody should have one, but the reason my personality and wellbeing is so intertwined with the things I create, is because I digest what I see in life through this. I don’t know what I‘d do if I weren’t doing music, and unless someone asks, it’s not something I have given too much thought to.

I’m sure at some point down the line I would have ended up on the same path. I thought becoming a better musician would make me a better artist - and as soon as I learned that that wasn’t the case, I made that decision to go on a different route.

Does creating a body of work ever result in you having any melancholy realisations that it won't be yours forever? Do you find any of the beauty in your work lost when you release something? 

Of course - there’s always a give and take. I think part of that is what makes any art great. There's a lot of conversation behind it. We know the artist has one perspective, but at the same time that artist can’t control the perspective anyone has when they listen to it, because everyone will view it through their own lens.

To some degree, you’re always curious as to how people are going to perceive and digest certain things, but I think you just have to be okay with the fact that you can’t control that. You obviously have your own vision of what a song means, how it should feel, and how you hope it makes people feel and cause them to think about something - but that’s out of our hands once we press upload. 

Speak to me about ‘Close’ 

The way I look at some of these songs is as them being vignettes - some are connected to each other, and others are like the weird scene that a director puts into a movie that makes no sense until you get to the end of it - ‘Close’ is connected to ‘Sycamore Tree’, ‘Head in A Jar’, and ‘Lonely In The Jungle’ - different sides of the same coin, but of the same story. I want people to listen to it and have their own interpretation, but when creating a tracklist, or an album sequence, I’m always thinking about how many of the songs can connect to each other, and if people want to be as thoughtful as you want them to be, how can you make that story make sense?

Sometimes a director has a vision for something, but the thing that makes that great isn't your vision matching exactly to the one the director had, it’s that you viewed their art through your own lens and connected it to something they didn't expect you to. It's a delicate line - wanting to share your story with people , but then wanting them to have the freedom to fill in the dots and connect the things they hear to their own lives. When I listen to Songs In The Key of Life, I’m not thinking about Stevie’s kids or girlfriends - I’m thinking about my own relationships, my future, and my past - that's what makes any art great. 

How do you want this album to translate with live performances?

One thing about this project that I’m really excited about is probably the live shows - leaning into the musicality of things, the instruments, and how things play out in that way of the soundscape - I’m looking forward to seeing that manifest itself into a show. The last project was its own monster, but I think this will be a little bit different and a lot easier to translate into something that feels like home in a different way. 

On this album, we start with ‘I Love Lucy', and end with ‘Apollo Eighteen’. How would you summarise the journey between these two tracks and the process in placing each story in its place? 

Any album that I’ve listened to that has really had an impression on me has pulled me in a lot of directions, rapidly, to the point where I feel like I have no control over where the artist is taking me. I think that can be a beautiful thing if you’re truly invested in sitting down, listening to, and digesting a project. I don’t know if I have a few words to describe it, but I do hope that it is in good ways, and in thought provoking ways, it will be a project that will pull you in a couple different directions,  make you look inward, outward, and think about how it relates to your life - hopefully it connects to you and something that you’re going through that’s specific to you.