Nick Krewen
Special to the Star
Inside the chest of Ali Gatie beats the heart of a hopeless romantic.
And the Yemen-born R&B singer and songwriter, who calls both Mississauga and Los Angeles home, is the last to disagree with that assessment.
“I’m 100 per cent a hopeless romantic, the most hopeless,” concurs Gatie, who celebrates his 23rd birthday on May 31.
The evidence is overwhelming, beginning with his worldwide hit “It’s You,” an easygoing, acoustic-guitar-driven, three-minute-and-40-second slice of vulnerability that has topped the charts in Belgium and Malaysia, scored Top 10 rankings in Singapore, Lebanon and New Zealand, and registered over 450 million Spotify streams and 48 million YouTube views.
And despite fairly unimpressive local chart numbers – “It’s You” barely dented the Top 30 in Canada and the U.S., — he’s sold more than one million copies of the song south of the border and over 160,000 here at home.
In case you’re wondering if there’s a theme at work here, some of his ballad-heavy song titles alone will fill you in: “Used to You,” “Say to You,” “Love You Like That,” “Make You Mine,” “Losing You” or “What If I Told You That I Love You.”
No wonder he decided to call his first Warner Music album You. In a way, it’s a stroke of genius, keeping his subjects open-ended so they can relate more personally to the music’s message.
Not to mention that Gatie projects an innate sensitivity that seems to win him fans at the drop of a hat.
“I think I’m open to being very vulnerable,” he said in a call last week. “When I write my songs — although I write about my experiences — I’m always thinking about, how can I put this together? How can I put my collection of thoughts into words that Ashley in Detroit or someone in Malaysia is going to relate to?
“I’ve always been good at expressing my feelings to people and being able to communicate is one of my strengths. How I do that, I’m not sure. I think it’s just the honesty.”
For all his success, Gatie, a Muslim who grew up in Abu Dhabi before his family relocated to Mississauga, hasn’t been in the music business all that long.
He didn’t discover his passion until he was 18.
“In my senior year of high school, one of my friends who made music told me that I always talked about it, so go to a studio – it’s $50 an hour – and check it out,” Gatie remembers.
“I went and I made a song – I loved the ideas of making songs – so I kept going and kept releasing songs on SoundCloud for free. This was in 2016 and I just fell in love with that process. I suddenly realized that this is the only thing I’ve done that I really have a passion for and could actually see myself being happy doing, so I made the decision that I’m really going to try and do this.”
One of the reasons Gatie’s parents — an anesthesiologist and an electrical engineer – moved the singer and his three siblings to Mississauga was to provide them a better life.
“They dreamed that we’d all go to university and get good degrees,” Gatie says. “I was going to study biology and try to get into med school.”
But music disrupted those plans. Gatie did attend university for business … but then had a decision to make.
“I thought I could juggle music and business,” he says. “And juggling was fine, but it came down to running out of money. Do I pay for a textbook or do I pay for studio time? And while I studied business I realized, it was either going to be school or music, so I dropped out behind my parents’ back – which was the best thing I’ve ever done but the scariest thing I’ve ever done.”
Eventually he told his parents that he was taking a permanent break from post-secondary education, but not before he enjoyed a couple of breakthroughs.
In 2017, he won the RhymeStars Contest with an early hip-hop number called “How I Live.”
“I made $3,000 for submitting a video and my song. To me, that was my biggest success, because that was my first hope of, ‘Wow, somebody paid me for my music. I could really do this,’” he recalls.
Over the next year, he got serious about marketing, releasing a string of songs and “car videos” before his song “Moonlight” drew the attention of several labels in August 2018, including Warner Music.
Gatie, who considers Frank Ocean and Ed Sheeran strong influences, was convinced that hip hop wasn’t the path his heart wished to follow.
“I realized, that’s not what I am,” Gatie explained. “I love poetry and I am a hopeless romantic: I need to be myself if I want the world to love me.
“I just write music about who I am and how I feel and me being genuine, which is the reason that people like me now.”
These days, Gatie views himself as “in the middle of R&B pop: a mixture of The Weeknd and Justin Bieber, but there’s definitely that hip-hop influence in my music.”
Working with producers Danny Schofield (The Weeknd) and Sam Wishkoski (Kehlani, Megan Thee Stallion), Gatie’s single, “Running On My Mind,” was released May 29, and an album will be released in September.
“The album is a new side of me,” Gatie says. “It’s an evolved side of me; I sound like a whole different artist. It’s a lot brighter and it has a different energy and tone, but it still has those songs that I think my core fans are going to love.”
Of course, if he wasn’t housebound because of the COVID-19 pandemic, he would have appeared at the postponed Juno Awards back in March and done a series of dates at the Danforth Music Hall earlier this month.
But Gatie is taking it all in stride.
“I’ve always been a homey person,” he says. “Right now, I’m just focusing on my happiness and loving myself.”