Kenyon Dixon Talks Upcoming Joint Album with Terrace Martin, GRAMMY Nominations + more

One of R&B's leading men gets candid about his career, studying the greats, and new music.

Photo by Gianna Dorsey (@giannasnapped)

“R&B is dead.”

“I miss when R&B sounded like…”

Every time one of these conversations pops up on a platform like Twitter, I’m left baffled. Why? Because R&B is alive, and it’s thriving, and the music sounds fantastic. When people say they “miss R&B”, the first person I tell them to listen to is Kenyon Dixon.

If you know, you know! If you don’t – allow me. Kenyon Dixon is an independent artist born and raised in Los Angeles, California (Watts, to be exact). He grew up singing in church and has been making R&B music independently for years. He is a songwriter who has written for Justin Timberlake and Tank. He’s done background singing for Nick Jonas and Kirk Franklin. He loves Anita Baker and Marvin Gaye. His voice is professionally trained (he’s also a trained dancer). He makes love songs you can groove to and loves a bridge in his music!

He’s not afraid to embrace the past just as much as he embraces the present. He’s exactly what you want in a modern R&B superstar.

That love for the genre landed him at the GRAMMYs in 2024 and 2025 as a nominee for his songs “Can I Have This Groove” (2025) and “Lucky” (2024) – both nominated for Best Traditional R&B Performance. “Lucky” can be found on his ‘The R&B You Love’ album, while “Can I Have This Groove” is taken from ‘The R&B You Love: Soul Of The 70s’ EP.

Recently, I caught up with my guy Kenyon Dixon to hear his take on the current state of R&B, the importance of engaging with your fans, his upcoming album with the amazing jazz multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin, and more.

Dante: First off, congrats, bro! You’ve been nominated for GRAMMYs two years in a row for songs from the ‘The R&B You Love’ era. Do you feel like you met the goals you set for that album?

Kenyon: Man with ‘The R&B You Love, ’ my main goal really was just to create more conversation around classic R&B. I always say when we talk about R&B and nostalgia: our generation usually reverts to the 90s and early 2000s, which I am a fan of. But I wanted to go even further back and tap into soul and everything else. With this album, references were important to the conversation. I think it's important as an artist to introduce your heroes to your generation.

Looking at social media and how advanced technology is with how we receive music, we get a lot of interpolations and samples now. And I’ve noticed that some people don’t know the derivatives of the actual songs that they're listening to. They'll hear a remake of something, and they'll think that that's the original. So when I put out these records, I made sure they were specifically inspired by certain songs and certain eras. People started talking online, saying, “This song reminds me of this song or this era.”

So that was really my goal, just to get R&B back in the conversation on as big of a level as I could. Everything else was extra, man. I didn't expect any of the nominations or anything like that, you know. You never know when it comes to the accolades and stuff. You can hope for the best, but that was a plus for me. My goal of starting a conversation and just being able to identify the R&B that we love was executed, and it came with some additional perks that were cool.

Dante: When you're making a song for yourself (or for another artist), what's the thing that makes a song turn from being a “good” song to being an AMAZING song?

Kenyon: For me, it's really just the feeling, man. When I'm creating for myself, it's all about the feeling. I always identify what I want a song to feel like once I've started the process, and so I filter everything through that. And if I don't feel that feeling throughout the entire session, then I don't feel like the record is there. But if I can listen to the record and that feeling remains the entire time, then I know that the record is there.

When I'm writing records for other people, there are a bunch of other things I take into consideration. One of my biggest strengths with writing for other people is that a lot of the artists that I've written for, I've also toured with. So I have more insight into what these songs feel like live because, for me, that's the real determinant. You want them to be able to put these songs in their shows because that's what allows them to have more life. And so being on stage and seeing how their fans react to certain records, I take that into the studio, and I try and tap into that energy. So yeah, I guess on both sides, it does all come down to a feeling for me, but the feeling that I'm filtering it through can be different for myself versus the other artists.

Photo credit: Gianna Dorsey

Dante: I was watching an interview that Usher and KeKe Palmer did recently, and Usher brought up how it's super important for people to go back and learn music history and study the greats that came before them. He was like, nowadays you can hear a song and think it's trash, and it's really because you don't understand the reference. Obviously, I think your answer is yes, but do you think it's super important for today's artists to go back and study the greats that came before them?

Kenyon: Yeah, I think it's important. I don't think it's required, but I think you should if you care about the art. I like music and creativity. We like to think of it as being super subjective, but I do think that it can also be a bit objective. When I put it in the space of anything else that you would do, you would have to learn the history of something on a professional level to advance in that field. Art obviously works a little differently, but I think that, as a common courtesy, it would just serve you better to be fully aware of a space that you're operating in.

I would think that that's something people want to know, but when we look at the conversations around R&B and the complaints about the state that it's in, it’s not the case. I don't have a problem with people making what they want to make. I think you should! I think that's what makes music great. There's no gatekeeping creativity. But I do think for the bigger conversation and the preservation of legacy, it helps when artists know what they're actually a part of.

You could never graduate high school and then go straight to being a professor at a university. You know what I mean? You would have to do proper research and training to learn what you need to get in that space. And so, social media culture has created a platform where history is not necessary, and you can go from one thing to the other thing without having proper preparation. You can't really fault anybody for that. But I do think that again, for the preservation of the legacy of music and especially R&B – which is so important to the culture – it would be helpful to ourselves if we were able to know and share the history of what we do.

Dante: You've been collaborating a lot recently. You just dropped one with Jaz Karis; that sounds amazing. Who are some other people that you've never collaborated with that you would like to collaborate with in the future?

Kenyon: I think D Mile is amazing. We've worked together on other people's stuff, but I think D Mile and I would create some dope records. In the D Mile world, Lucky Daye, of course. Lucky is an amazing, incredible writer and vocalist. I think we'd have a great understanding – we've also worked together but on something else, never for ourselves. You know I'm a huge Anita Baker fan. That's always number one for me. I think that one of my strengths with music is my (ironically, from what we were just talking about) my understanding of it. And so I think that I'd be able to take legacy artists like that and carefully and correctly bring them into a modern space without tainting what they've built. And so that's a thing for me with Anita. But man, Tiana Major9 is amazing. Jazmine Sullivan. There are so many people I’d love to work with.

Dante: I don't know if you've said this publicly yet, but you told me you're working on a Terrace Martin project.

Kenyon: Oh yeah!

Dante: What's the vibe with that one?

Kenyon: So me and Terrace Martin, we're working on a collaborative album, which we've actually finished. We're just doing some post-production stuff right now. That'll be my next project that's dropping. Super soon! We both feel like it's some of our best work. It’s a very, very special project, man. I mean, two LA natives coming together who have a greater understanding of music and appreciation for it outside of our main genres. The way we've been able to kind of inspire and stretch each other – I think has been super cool.

It's so funny because going into the project, Terrace loves that I'm the R&B guy. Terrace loves that world. And I love that Terrace is “left” of that. Because I'm like, I do my R&B all the time. I want to do something different. So it was funny the way we would like push and pull because he wanted more of my R&B, and I wanted more of what he does. I'm like, “Man, bring me into your world!” So we found a medium, which I think is dope.

There's some classic me on there. There's some classic Terrace. But we're also in some spaces that people have not heard us in. And that's what I'm more excited about. I was able to go a little more alt on some stuff, some stuff is more modern than I've ever done. You know what I mean? It's like a great, well-rounded project, well-written, well-produced. I'm really excited about it.

Photo credit: Gianna Dorsey

Dante: I feel like you're one of the few indie artists that I see being great at promoting your music and engaging with your fans. How important is it for you to build that relationship with your fan base? Especially as an independent artist?

Kenyon: It's so funny, man. Me and Zyah [Belle] just had this conversation yesterday. I think, for one, I’m just a fan of social media and content as a consumer. So I think that's one thing that makes me great at engaging and interacting. I'm on TikTok scrolling. I enjoy the trends and videos. You know what I mean? So it's not anything that's out of my wheelhouse, I guess. However, because I'm building a real career in music that’s not just a hobby, it's important to make decisions that give you longevity, and longevity comes from actually building with your fans.

That's something I've learned from looking at more classic R&B artists. I think fans appreciate it, too. From their mouths, I always hear them say, “Man, we've never met an artist who makes us feel like we're in their world or actually is listening to what we say.” You’ve got to pay attention to stuff like that! Because again, these are the people that you're asking to support you. It's genuine for me, and I think that's the difference. I like interacting with them. I want to know how my music makes you feel. What are you thinking? These are the things that I'm intrigued by.

I'm like that as a person as well. So it just so happens that that works well in the creative professional space, where these things have become like virtues or assets to build on. I always tell my manager that if I ever stopped doing music – which, I would never stop doing music. But as a side quest, I would love to even get into starting something like a creative marketing hub, just because I have so many ideas and I like to like try stuff, see if it works. I'm great at pivoting. These are all things that I have a natural interest in, and I've been able to apply them to my career, and it just so happened to work.

Dante: Last question. If you had any advice for any up-and-coming R&B artists that are currently independent, what advice would you give them?

Kenyon: Man, it’s funny. I sporadically tweeted something the other day that I actually think is the greatest advice right now, which is:

Put your ego aside and hustle.

I think a lot of this is an effect of social media. But nowadays, you're taught aesthetic before you're taught substance. And so a lot of artists come in with the aesthetic, with the engagement, but no actual product for what they want to do. Or the product is not to the standard of their aesthetic. What I've seen happen is that a lot of artists feel like they should be further ahead, but they haven’t done any work in the space for what they want to be receiving.

At one point, I used to sing background for Nick Jonas. Nick is coming from the Jonas Brothers! This is one of the biggest boy bands in the world at the time, you know what I mean? Collectively, they're playing arenas, but with Nick, we were playing smaller venues, and I didn't understand it at first until we had a conversation one day. He was like, “Yeah, as that brand with my brothers; we are THAT. But I’m a new artist technically…I’m on my own. This is not me and them.”

Sometimes, it's great that you have success in some areas, but if you want true success across the board, make sure you build up that thing to meet those expectations. Just because you feel like you look the part doesn’t mean that you should just immediately get whatever you want.

I think we’ve just got to get back to really strengthening our work ethic and making sure that our work looks like what we desire. So yeah, I would say that's probably my greatest advice to artists right now.