“I’ve always been into music, ever since I was little. I think I started playing the guitar around when I was 13 years old and I’ve gone through different stages of making music,” says Casey Luong, a 23 year old singer/songwriter known as “keshi.” Have you ever seen an anime girl with a book working industriously after searching up “chill study music” on Youtube? If so, the video was likely accompanied by mellow music in the background mixed with a flawed sound quality. This genre of music is known as “Lo-fi.” Keshi, before entering the music industry out of pure passion, was an oncology nurse at Texas Medical Center. He has stated that working both as an oncology nurse and flying weekly to New York for music meetings overwhelmed, so he decided to focus solely on producing music.

His music falls in the genre of Lo-fi hip-hop and some of his songs are often listened to as background study music. His music genres primarily fall under Lo-fi and Alternative/Indie. Mixing his music with his falsetto vocals, he has built up over 700 million streams with songs such as “like i need u”, “right here” and “2 soon”. 

According to an interview by Clarrisa Aben on Keshi, he mentioned that basing his music off of his real life experiences and stories is what makes his music so genuine sounding. Most of the songs that you hear are often an imaginative desire, usually dedicated to others in the form of a music. Occasionally other artists, such as keshi,  base off their own discography from his experience.  “Before keshi, I did very acoustic-based music, like John Mayer and Ed Sheeran: that’s who I looked up to,” 

Keshi taught himself songwriting, producing, and music engineering through YouTube tutorials. Unfortunately, as he recorded his music under his birth name, keshi wasn’t attracting any attention, and something seemed to be “missing” from his music. “Something had to change in that mix. I was at a real war with myself. I wanted to quit guitar,” Keshi stated. 

 Luckily, Frank Ocean’s 2016 album “Blonde” catalyzed a turn for the better for the composer by making him think differently about his music. During college, he quietly created a Soundcloud page under the name “keshi,” a Japanese pronunciation of the name “Casey” used by his friends and his family. Using Soundcloud, he uploaded his work, which, as he described it, was “weird and experimental stuff.” Things then progressed quickly for keshi as he was gaining an astounding amount of followers on his social media platforms, eventually earning himself a call to fly to New York for a label meeting. 

“It was supposed to be just a username. I didn’t expect it to explode. It’s not like I didn’t want to be listened to; I just didn’t expect it to turn into its own thing,” keshi says. He knew that making music was not just a hobby to him, but instead something he was passionate about. 

In 2017, Keshi released his first song “over u” which can be found both in his Spotify and Soundcloud. On November 13, 2018, he released his first album “the reaper,” containing “like i need u,” “2 soon,” and “i swear i’ll never leave again,” with his subsequential albums, “skeletons,” “bandaids,” and “always” being released in the following years. To this day, Keshi still continues to produce music in hopes of continuing growth in his career.