Keshi stays vigilant at his local H-E-B. Is anyone following him through the produce section? Did that shopper’s gaze linger as he waited in line to check out? “I’m always surprised where I’ll get caught,” he told me in August. He isn’t concerned with watchful store clerks—he’s not juggling tomatoes or pocketing Juicy Fruit. He’s bracing for the passersby who recognize him and whip out their iPhones, the ones whose faces register, “omigod it’s Keshi squeeeee!!!”
In the years since Keshi’s first SoundCloud post in 2017, the 29-year-old prince of lo-fi pop R&B has been finding it increasingly difficult to maintain anonymity in public, whether he’s strolling the New York City streets, dining after a show in Shanghai, or running errands around Houston. And with a new record, Requiem, out September 13 (with more than 120 million streams to date), and an upcoming world tour that launches in 2025, his days of incognito grocery shopping are numbered.
Before the Keshi fandom reaches its anticipated ubiquity, I spent time with him in his old stomping grounds. We drove from his current Houston home to Sugar Land, where Casey Luong was raised by his parents, computer programmers who emigrated from Vietnam. The singer’s straight, long, black hair brushed against shoulders, which are decorated with tattoos but were covered by a blue jean jacket despite the heat and humidity. For a singer who has been mobbed by fans, Keshi displayed roughly zero prima donna tendencies but plenty of curiosity about his surroundings and his companion: I wonder what kind of trees these are. What kind of music do you like? I love national parks. Do you prefer Buc-ee’s or Hruska’s kolaches when you’re driving on from Austin to Houston?
“So this is the railroad that I grew up next to,” he said, pointing to the tracks on the side of U.S. Highway 90, referenced in the Requiem song lyrics, “Texas”: “Take me back to Texas / Take me back to seventeen / Let me race the train tracks / Just to smell the gasoline.”
Nodding toward the abandoned sugar factory down the road, he continued, “My sign that I’m getting close.” Back in 2017, he made this drive between Houston and Sugar Land regularly. Having graduated UT-Austin with a nursing degree, he’d moved back in with his parents while he worked shifts at the Texas Medical Center in downtown Houston. Every morning at 5:30, he slid into his Hyundai Sonata and cranked John Mayer, Bryson Tiller, or Brockhampton as he sped down the dark, empty highway on his way to the oncology ward. Then each afternoon, he returned home with the sinking realization that he was not cut out for nursing.
His dad would attempt to rally his spirits. “We came from war and gave you this life,” he’d say. “This is an opportunity anyone would die for.” Keshi tried to find solace in those words. He was a practical person at heart.
Still, he fantasized about a career that (rightfully) gives many parents blurry vision and heart palpitations, including his own mom and dad: musician. Luong had already been playing around with the guitar since he was fourteen; as a kid, he’d walk a few blocks from his white-brick house down to a strip center and slap down his lawn-mowing money for lessons on a Taylor acoustic at Dale’s Guitar Shop. He’d even begun training his voice in falsetto. And while early efforts sounded like a high-pitched whistle, he developed a tone that’s strong and clear. He played around with production tools. He even recorded. But the tracks he created on his own were just for him.
Until one day, after a work shift at the hospital, he decided to transmit his recordings past the confines of his room, just to see if they’d get a reaction. He uploaded a song to his SoundCloud account under the name Keshi—spelled the way his childhood friend’s Japanese-born parents pronounced his first name. He was the sole writer, producer, and instrumentalist for the pillow-soft beats layered under his whispering falsetto. The song evoked a dreamy quality, like floating on a cloud or swimming underwater.
Commenters called it “angelic” and declared, “this is it!” A few hundred followers later, they were writing, “love you kessssshiiiii❤️❤️” and “this dope af.” He assured his family the recordings were just a hobby. But in 2019, as his music exploded from 16 million streams to 150 million, Luong quit nursing and signed a deal with Island Records to become the artist known as Keshi.
“He’s fascinating to me,” said Justin Eshak, the Houston-raised CEO of Island Records. “There’s some DNA of that Texas blues songwriter thing that exists in Keshi. If you’re not paying attention, you can kind of miss that.”
Keshi’s audience, once dominated by Asian Americans, has gradually diversified, and yet some commenters still conflate his work with K-pop—a labeling that confuses the singer. “Yeah, not adjacent in the slightest,” he said, laughing. “It’s just like . . . I’m from East Asia; my blood is. But I’m a born and raised Texas boy, right?” He is still close with his family, and they live a short drive away from his home. “I wish I had, like, a cowboy hat. It’s kind of a sin that I don’t.”
Strategically, Keshi was a solid bet for the label. Island took note of his passionate fans—a key element to predicting success in the current music climate—and the executives’ gamble showed signs of paying off early. At the beginning of Keshi’s first tour in spring of 2022, he sold out two nights at New York City’s Webster Hall, which has the capacity for 1,400 fans. By the end of the tour, he sold out two nights at Radio City Music Hall, where more than three times as many people saw him perform. Keshi didn’t even have a hit in his set.
As we drove down the wide, tree-lined streets of his old Sugar Land neighborhood, Keshi became nostalgic. We passed Pecan Park, where he’d snatch the nuts off the ground and jam them into his mouth; the tennis courts, where he volleyed regularly until guitars eclipsed his interest in racquets; his elementary school; the brick wall, where he once crashed his bike; the fountains.
Then we headed toward Bellaire Avenue, an area populated by Asian-owned businesses. “Dude, imagine going to school next to Chinatown,” he said as we passed the kids getting out of school. “That’s so sick!” We pulled into a shopping center and walked into the legendary Nu Cafe Ice Cream and Boba, taking in the colorful tapiocas, jellies, and intimidating mounds of shaved ice girded with fruit. Keshi struggled to narrow down his options. “This one actually tastes like tea, which is really great. It’s like a Hong Kong–style. Like, dang, it’s like a lychee. Y’all know what lychee is? Same concept,” he said.
To his relief, the older clientele on this Monday afternoon didn’t give him a second glance. After school dismissal and the younger crowd’s arrival, he says, the requests for photos would require a quick exit. “This is the reality of the trade that I made,” he said. “If I chucked my phone into the ocean and said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ are people going to stop recognizing me? And the answer is no.”
“With someone like him, it’s just a matter of when,” said Eshak. He wasn’t sure if Keshi would become a household name in three months or six or some time after his next world tour begins, but watching the trajectory of other Island Records performers like Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, he recognized a pattern in passionate audiences like Keshi’s. “When you get the right body of work, the right song into that [fandom],” he said, “that’s when the powder keg happens.”
Keshi’s grandpa still wants him to go back to working at a hospital. “Every year when I sing for Christmas, he’s like, ‘Just a hobby, okay?’ ” Grandpa will have to be content with Madison Square Garden.
