KEVIN GARRETT

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The young singer-songwriter Kevin Garrett can now count Beyoncé, Katy Perry, and Sam Smith among his fans, but those superstars are a far cry from the three audience members who gathered for his somewhat inauspicious début concert years ago as an undergraduate at NYU. “The very first show I played in New York was at 3:00 PM on a Sunday at Rockwood Music Hall,” he recalls. “I sat down with an acoustic guitar and played for a half-hour to three people, my RA in college and two off-duty police officers who were just outside and thought it would be fun to come in.”

Still, Rockwood asked Garrett back again and again, and he would play there about once a month through his college years, working up from covers to “some originals that I’m never going to play again” to songs that marked the evolution to his current neo-soul sound, one which offers honest, soulful lyrics—often sung in a touching falsetto—backed by minimalist electronic beats.

The 25-year-old Garrett credits his Rockwood residency with helping him become comfortable with performing, a shift he pursued at NYU as a step away from his degree studies in audio engineering, but one that he had been hoping to make all along. A musician since the age of four, when he first picked up the violin in his hometown of Pittsburgh, he says that pursuing a career as a performer had always been at the back of his mind, even if he wasn’t sure at first that he could make it happen. “When I started writing songs when I was thirteen, it was like, ‘Oh, that’d be really cool to play and perform,’ but it was always the dream gig—it wasn’t a career or anything,” he explains. “When I got to New York and played my first show and then played my second show and then played the third and started realizing that I could hang, it was like, ‘This makes sense, let’s do this.’ There was a week in high school when I wanted to be a doctor because I did really well on an anatomy test, then I went home and picked up my guitar again and I was like, ‘No, I can’t.’ Music’s always been the focal point for what I want to do, but definitely once I got to New York it put things in perspective.”

Garrett performed as part of a folk-rock band called Noble Hunter at NYU, where he had the opportunity to develop his songwriting skills further. When the act drifted apart after graduation, Garrett turned his attention more towards piano, and from the “storytelling” sort of writing he had been doing to something more personal. It was when he started performing and recording on his own again that he began to focus his signature sound. “The guy I was working with from a production standpoint made this decision to try and find a way to make this electro-soul as accessible as possible, and that’s what I was going for with these songs,” he explains.

Two years ago, Garrett signed with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation as a writer before leaving on his first tour, with James Vincent McMorrow. He released his first EP, Mellow Drama, last spring, with soulful tracks like “Coloring” and “Control,” which earned him Twitter mentions from Katy Perry and Sam Smith, both of whom have reached out to stay in touch since. “I was in Des Moines, Iowa, when he tweeted about it,” says Garrett of Smith. “We were throwing a Frisbee around in the parking lot of a Comfort Inn and then it just popped up. I thought it was a fake account. Thank god for those blue checkmarks!”

Now at work on his first full-length album, Garrett credits an eclectic mix of inspirations for his unique style—Sam Cooke and Ray Charles for vocals, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan for lyrics—and appreciates comparisons to Frank Ocean and James Blake as genre compatriots. “I really like negative space in anything, so there’s a lot of minimalist technique in the production. I think it’s rooted in me writing the song from the ground up at a keyboard or with a guitar with nothing else helping me,” he explains. “I’m a big fan of silence and letting the song speak for itself. You don’t need fifty guitar parts and twelve synth layers and a bass line. You just need the song to pulse and you need it to breathe itself.”

Garrett has also been busy on the road—so much so that he jokes that he is basically living out of his car—touring with X Ambassadors last fall and with 2015 breakout Alessia Cara earlier this year. Through it all, he continues to work on new music, including songs that he describes as “the most open and honest that I can be.” He also recently got another major boost from Beyoncé, who tapped him to help with writing and producing (along with James Blake) “Pray You Catch Me,” the opening song off Lemonade. “It was a collaborative process,” he says of working with the inimitable star. “Once she added her voice and her honesty to the track, it really pushed everything over the top.”

Many young artists might see working with Beyoncé as the height of their career, but for Garrett, it’s just a highlight at the beginning, with much more to come. “When I released ‘Coloring,’ in my own personal iTunes I called the genre odd soul, which was just a joke—it was a reference to one of my favorite songs by Mutemath. It had nothing to do with their song, but it was more like soul music with weird influences and that’s what makes it odd,” he laughs. “But I did an interview and one of the first things they led with was, ‘So what’s this odd soul thing that you’re doing? I don’t know anybody else who makes odd soul music.’ I was like, ‘That’s because it doesn’t exist,’ but now my life goal is to make odd soul a default on the iTunes genre list and not just on my computer.”