keshi Navigates Desire in “beside you”

by qiqi @y.ngqi

Universal Music Group / Island Records

Vietnamese American alt-pop and R&B artist Casey Luong––better known by his stage name keshi––just released his first single of 2021 “beside you.” The track, produced in collaboration with French artist Madeon, is unabashedly vulnerable––naked, even, in several senses of the word: the track’s wistful sensuality is an easily recognizable signature of keshi’s sad boy narrative. This track is preceded by the release of keshi’s 2020 EP always and is the first new original after a brief six month hiatus.

Though the clean tones of his guitar are not as heavily foregrounded in “beside you” as some of his older tracks, the progression of the song is still suffused with the melodic melancholy of keshi’s inspiration, John Mayer: keshi’s soft falsetto and guitarwork shines in two of his verses, which are framed by the heavier percussive elements of the piece. Keshi vies for some form of unity between himself and his prospective lover, albeit of the carnal sort. “His love never felt right,” keshi negotiates. “Switch sides and I’m beside you.”

Kenji Chong

The uncertain, unstable liminality of undefined relationships is a topic keshi returns to time and time again in his songs; heartbreak is a state that he seems to be intimately familiar with, and these persistent themes can be traced back to his earliest releases. Keshi’s songs are tethered by the tensile forces of bitter and sweet, insecurity and assertion, inebriation and sobriety––in this, “beside you” feels like the spiritual successor and opposite to his song “B.Y.S.” (the title is speculated to be an abbreviation of either “beside yourself” or “by your side” as implied in the song’s lyrics) from his 2020 EP always. Keshi consoles his lover in “B.Y.S.” with a pleading “Baby girl... don’t cry, alright;” a sobering contrast to his assertion in “beside you” to “don’t lie, baby, don’t lie.”

Keshi’s tentativeness is likewise exhibited in the song’s instrumentation. The ascending arpeggiated instrumentation injects a form of levity into the questions keshi asks his lover. In the face of this forced casualness is an undeniable sort of precariousness in “beside you,” giving the song a surprisingly unguarded and restrained quality despite the suggestive subject matter. As is often the case for keshi’s music, this track is a rumination of hypotheticals as much as it is an exploration of negatives: “never meant to cross you,” he concedes. “[I] think I want you... can I make you mine?”

The hesitation and yearning that engulfs “beside you” feels like a treatise on remembering and reclaiming intimacy. As keshi sings, “your skin, so fine / come close... put it on mine,” we can only hope to treat this single as express permission to rediscover how to externalize our desires once more after a year of social distancing.