Since releasing his debut album American Teen in 2017, Khalid has become a go-to collaborator in the music world, and he’s worked with everybody from Post Malone to Kane Brown to Calvin Harris. There are a couple of featured appearances on his upcoming Free Spirit album, but if you dig through the credits, you’ll see that Father John Misty wrote the song “Heaven.”
Khalid spoke about working on the song with Misty on his new Beats 1 Free Spirit Radio show, and he seemed thrilled to have the opportunity to work with him, saying:
“Father John Misty wrote ‘Heaven,’ and that’s the song he played to me with the Cinderella moment, right? Talking to him about that song, that’s a song that he loved a lot and he felt like it was so fitting for me. I did too. I feel like when I sing that song, I can almost hear him on the record as well. […]
I would never pass on singing a Father John Misty song and putting that on my album ever. If Father John Misty is like, ‘Yo, here, look here’s this song, you want to sing it?’ I’m like, ‘Hell yeah I want to sing that’ … One, he inspires me so much, so I feel like his voice, or my voice at least, is not too far off from his, because that’s a voice that I grew up with, and I sat with, and I lived with. I love that I got to take a song that he wrote and interpret it in the way that it makes me feel. I love that when I listen to it, I hear him on it. For me, that’s a present, that’s a gift. How many people do you know out there who can say that they’ve sang a song that Father John Misty has wrote? The fact that he looks to me and he’s like, ‘You’re going to do this song justice, and you’re going to sing this song the way that it should be sang.’ Amazing.”
He also recently shared a new song called “Don’t Pretend,” so check that out here.
