Meet:
Khalid Quesada
As a precocious child,
raised on the pop antics of
The Monkees and Kiss, Khalid Quesada decided at
an early age that the one
thing he wanted to do was
make music. He started writing songs before he could
even competently play an
instrument, but eventually
taught himself to play guitar a few months before his 14th birthday. Trading in a naïve love of Def Leppard
and Michael Jackson for something with a little more substance and purity as rock
bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam guided him into adolescence, he fell in love with
the electric guitar and, by association, the distortion pedal. The friendships, most
lasting into adulthood, formed at this time were partly based on a love of rock
music, and ultimately helped shape the songwriter he soon became. Through high
school, while alternately shifting between electric and acoustic guitar, he also began a love/hate relationship with poetry as a means of dealing with the boredoms
of class and the trappings of cliques. Teenage life was just as wonderful and terrible as anyone else claims, but he used his way with words to put more into his lyrics
than most of what he was hearing from his contemporaries. While he later admits
that the majority of songs he was writing weren’t very good, he was determined
to write the best songs he could without compromise. A strong focus on melody,
his love of power pop titans like Weezer and the Pixies weighed heavily on how he
crafted songs as he was exiting his teenage semi-rebellion years. Around the same
time, he also fell in love with the work of Elliott Smith, especially in the obvious nods
to The Beatles, and appreciated the simplicity of sometimes just crafting songs
around an acoustic guitar, while not always being bound to it. (Cont’d)
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