STREAM 'The Want' by Young Dervish -
https://yd.lnk.to/thewant
Written & Performed by Zakariya Khan
Produced by Zakariya Khan
Visual by Braden Lee, Concept by Zakariya Khan
Follow Young Dervish
https://instagram.com/young_dervish
https://tiktok.com/@youngdervish
https://soundcloud.com/youngdervish
LYRICS
Want it but I can’t come 'round
No, I won’t try
To fight it cause’ I’m crashing down
You say you love?
You say you trust?
You say I’m what you really want?
Say you love?
Say you trust?
Say you want me enough?
Want it but I don’t know how to say
That I need you now
And I need you to stay
Just stay for a while
You say you love?
You say you trust?
You say I’m what you really want?
Say you love?
Say you trust?
Say you want me enough?
#youngdervish #thewant #fretlessguitar
Young Dervish is the alias of Minneapolis-based multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, and producer Zakariya Khan. Born in Pakistan and raised in Saudi Arabia, Khan’s fascination with the guitar started at age 11. “A lot of my earliest memories were surrounded by music from that part of the world…all these different ways that people sing and play their instruments,” he says. Rooted in the Twin Cities’ music scene since college, Khan builds fretless guitars, preferring the freedom and innate cadence required to balance notes on your own, to keep them precise only by ear. “It forces me to carefully listen to what’s coming out of my guitar and be selective about what to play in each moment.” In 2024, after years of producing and engineering music for others, he started sharing self-recorded performance videos with a growing audience on Instagram, resetting his process to get in touch with songwriting on its purest level. The free-flowing clips capture the spirit of an artist unlocking something from within; they can be seen now as a window into the many riffs and hooks that animate his full-length debut, Fretless Sex. Fusing blues, folk, and pop music, the album is marked by boundless expression.
These songs find Khan following a surge of creative energy, deeply tuned to his instruments, mainly guitar, drums, piano, and voice. While his past projects have swelled into dense tracks stacked within Ableton, here, the artist is streamlined, unweighted by digital layers. “I could get the same type of nuance and depth, and feeling without having to do a whole lot on the computer,” he explains. Going fretless “felt like I was relearning how to play again, all these new ideas and sounds to play with…a whole new world, and I just kept writing songs in it. Everything's right here. It just felt very liberating.” Beyond his own practice of jamming — often outdoors under a tree, as seen in the clips, which he likens to a neutral, meditative state – Khan credits the change in mindset to a recent dive into some all-time favorite catalogs including Sly & The Family Stone, America, Prince, and D'Angelo’s 2014 masterwork, Black Messiah. “Listening back to those just allowed me to embrace more grit and more rawness with playing and with songwriting.”
Lead single “The Want” introduces Khan’s clever approach to rhythm and groove, with two sections playing off each other, one straightforward and the other off-kilter, all building from that first riff. Snaps of percussion enter the frame, followed by hits of clavinet, a subtle nod to Sly, as Khan’s lyrics detail feelings of desire and uncertainty, “the push and pull stage of getting to know someone,” he says.
