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Kehlani

CTL-E-5368 · Person · musician · 1995–present

VERIFIED evidence grade of this record

Oakland singer, songwriter and dancer whose forthright, diary-honest writing carried them from teen television to the center of contemporary R&B. Kehlani Ashley Parrish was born on April 24, 1995, in Oakland, California, trained first as a dancer at the Oakland School for the Arts, and first reached a national audience in 2011 as frontperson of the teen group PopLyfe on America's Got Talent. Going solo, they self-released the mixtape Cloud 19 in 2014 and followed it with You Should Be Here (2015), which earned a Grammy nomination for Best Urban Contemporary Album and a deal with Atlantic Records. Their debut studio album SweetSexySavage (2017) peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, and It Was Good Until It Wasn't (2020) reached No. 2, with Blue Water Road (2022) and Crash (2024) extending a catalog marked by candor about love, loss and recovery. In 2025 the single Folded became their first Hot 100 top ten hit, peaking at No. 6, and went on to win two Grammy Awards.

The record

Notes

Statistics: Born April 24, 1995, in Oakland, California (AllMusic biography, accessed October 15, 2026) · SweetSexySavage peaked at No. 3 and It Was Good Until It Wasn't at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 (AllMusic; Essence, 2026) · Folded peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won Best R&B Performance and Best R&B Song at the 68th Grammy Awards in February 2026 (Essence, 2026) · Curator's Judgment: DRAFT — Kehlani's long game is the story: a decade of respected albums and features preceded their first solo top ten hit, and Folded rewarded patience without sanding down the candor that built their audience. CTL reads them as Oakland's defining R&B voice of their generation — a dancer's precision in service of a diarist's honesty. · Photo slot: CLEARED — Wikimedia Commons File:Kehlani at ESSENCE Festival of Culture 2026 (6).jpg, AlgernonLalinn, CC BY-SA 4.0, verified via Commons API 2026-10-15; direct URL https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a8/Kehlani_at_ESSENCE_Festival_of_Culture_2026_%286%29.jpg/1920px-Kehlani_at_ESSENCE_Festival_of_Culture_2026_%286%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail; master in packet photos/.

Sources

Kehlani at the ESSENCE Festival of Culture, as titled on Wikimedia Commons (Commons date field reads 2019-11-06, inconsistent with the file title; see packet report).
Kehlani at the ESSENCE Festival of Culture, as titled on Wikimedia Commons (Commons date field reads 2019-11-06, inconsistent with the file title; see packet report).Photo: AlgernonLalinn, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Record CTL-E-5368 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · evidence grade: VERIFIED · 2 sources (1 primary) · CTL research: PPL-001.
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Cite as: CultureTechLens, “Kehlani (CTL-E-5368),” CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph, October 2026. https://culturetechlens.com/graph/entities/ctl-e-5368/

Chicago: CultureTechLens. “Kehlani (CTL-E-5368).” CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph. Chicago, IL: CultureTechLens, 2026. https://culturetechlens.com/graph/entities/ctl-e-5368/
APA: CultureTechLens. (2026). Kehlani (CTL-E-5368) [Entity record]. CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph. https://culturetechlens.com/graph/entities/ctl-e-5368/
MLA: CultureTechLens. “Kehlani (CTL-E-5368).” CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph, 2026, https://culturetechlens.com/graph/entities/ctl-e-5368/

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