Khalid Al Khajah’s “After The Rain” imagines what occurs when emotions you thought had settled start to stir once more. It begins with an outdated flame showing within the city he’d left behind for London, questioning whether or not her desires got here true, admitting his personal life is barely “kinda, sorta” sorted, and discovering that no matter was between them hasn’t fairly gone chilly. The retailers haven’t moved. Neither has the nook. That’s exactly what makes the outdated feeling really easy to fall again into.
Al Khajah is a singer, songwriter and producer now primarily based in London, working in various R&B and indie-pop. He grew up in Bahrain, the place he fell for R&B and pop listening to the radio from the again seat of his mother and father’ automotive, and taught himself to write down and sing off the again of it. Earlier than music turned the job, he labored in banking, writing songs on his lunch breaks and moonlighting as a singer at The Jazz Bar in Edinburgh, which is the place “After The Rain” was written, on a kind of breaks. The tune is the primary single from his upcoming five-track EP.
He’s cited Invoice Withers’ “Hey Like Earlier than” as a touchstone, and it reveals in how little the melody insists on something, extra like somebody speaking by means of an outdated reminiscence than performing a tune. The monitor strikes at a mid-tempo tempo, giving the phrases room to take a seat relatively than rush previous. The refrain turns the title right into a plea relatively than a metaphor: “wouldn’t it’s good to take a stroll, after the rain is gone,” a stroll down reminiscence lane that feels much less like closure than one other starting.
Produced with Jules Oliver at Urchin Studios, the piano carries a lot of the weight early on, soft-pedalled and barely behind the beat, earlier than brushed drums and a rounded bass line ease in. His vocals keep conversational and clean all through, matching the low-key nerve of a person not fairly certain what he’s strolling into.
The bridge weighs “higher left to develop aside” in opposition to “at all times knew I’d see you once more,” and leans towards the second. The streets haven’t modified. He has. And a few a part of him was ready for this anyway.
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