At 30, singer Giveon is living his best life. But that doesn’t mean he has no regrets.
The R&B star, who first broke out with hit breakup song “Heartbreak Anniversary” in 2021, is back with a silky sophomore album titled Beloved. On it, across 14 soulful tracks, he digs deep and goes there.
“I just have more understanding of who I am and just what I like and what moves me more,” he tells PEOPLE of what made the process of this project different from his breakout EP, 2020’s Take Time. “I save a lot of time now. I just don’t spend time doing stuff that I know doesn’t serve me or doesn’t work for me.”
Ben Dorado
It’s a lesson he says he learned the hard way, and sings about on the new project. On the lead single “Twenties,” released earlier this year, Giveon details a doomed relationship that should have ended much earlier. “Six years gone down the drain, I guess I’m half to blame, I didn’t know, I didn’t know I’d be wasting my time,” he croons on the song, with a moody video that’s raked up 15 million views on YouTube.
“I was sitting in the studio with the band and friends, and I was going to write something more romantic and poetic and heartfelt,” he explains of how the song came to be. “It started from, if you’re a guy who’s a lover boy who’s always in relationships, but all your homies are just running around doing whatever they want. I was going to write a song saying how I’m seeing them have all of this freedom, but I’m still choosing to spend my formative years with you.”
But reflecting on his real life made him pivot. “As I was saying it out loud, I was like, ‘What? No, I just wasted that time!’ So then it turned into frustration and almost resentment. And I was like, this is a feeling I want to capture right now. And then it was proof that people needed to feel it and hear it because of the reaction that I got from it.”
The song has left fans to speculate on who Giveon, who previously dated fellow singer Justine Skye before their messy split, could be singing about. He figured this would happen. While writing, “I changed some lyrics. It was getting too specific, but I kept some specifics in there. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I mean, what am I supposed to do? I didn’t say her name.”
Ben Dorado
Ask Giveon: it’s all his truth to tell. The entire album, he says, “is just a realistic love story from a man’s point of view. Right or wrong, it’s just honest. It’s extremely cohesive and like 90% analog. Everything was played live and it touches on the good, the bad, the ugly,” he says.
“My fans are going to hear where I’ve been and understand what took so long. You can tell there’s been life lived within my absence.”
And while he can’t get his 20s back, the seven-time Grammy nominee is making the most of his single life now. Asked about the state of his DMs he answers, “They’re still hectic. I don’t think I made it any better because I’ve sent a few of my own. I’m just like everybody else, like ‘Hey, how are you? Give me something to write about.'”
