Xavier Omär Speaks on His Relationships, His New Album & Why He Doesn’t Wanna Be Known as R&B’s Nice Guy

Xavier Omär knows everyone considers him to be R&B’s chivalrous savant. The singer-songwriter, who returned with his latest effort HunnyMoon Mountain back in May, is known for his heartfelt serenades. His biggest songs like “Blind Man” and “Feelings 4 You” serve as poetic ballads on many couples wedding day, and while Omär doesn’t hate being labeled as, “the R&B singer that respects women,” his new project seeks to push back against this idea that he’s always courteous and respectful towards the people in his life.

This new album, Omär’s first full length release in five years, moves along like R&B theater, traversing the highs and lows of a relationship in crisis during what should be a peak movement of elation: the honeymoon. The story behind the record is partly inspired by a close friend of Omär’s, who brought his fiancée to Disneyland in the hopes the “Happiest Place On Earth” would rekindle similar feelings in their own relationship. It did not. However, as the album moves along, the couple in question stick it out together. By the end, they’ve found common ground again, they’ve scaled the mountain and found their way back to love.

“The story of it starts at the hardest point of like, ‘I’m not feeling this at all.’ Like, I know I want to be with this person,” Omär tells Billboard. “You love this person, you want it to work, but you have to do work to make it work. You have to get through tough spots together.”

As Xavier Omär gets ready to kick off a new tour and new chapter of his career, Billboard spoke with the singer about his relationship to God, his music and contemporary R&B as a whole.

You haven’t dropped a proper album in almost five years. What happened between If You Feel and HunnyMoon Mountain? What took so long?

It wasn’t specifically like, “Oh, I’m not doing an album,” as much as it was looking at what made sense in the moment to do. First of all, with the result that I have now, I’m very glad I took the time with it. But when I was making If You Feel I had no kids, been married for like a year, I was 29, all that stuff. With the b l u r r EP, it was very much called b l u r r because I didn’t know what was going on in my life. I was trying to figure out where I was going next album-wise or music-wise, I was just making records.

I was very happy both “Tarantino” and “Feelings 4 You” stuck really well. “Feelings 4 You” appeared on Obama’s playlist that year, which was cool. Like, who told Obama about my song? There’s no way he found it himself.

I’ve heard all these rumors that he doesn’t actually listen to any of the songs that appear on his playlist.

I feel like he can’t! Like it has to be staff that might suggest stuff to him. I think he hears the song before his name goes on the list for sure, but there’s no way he found [“Feelings 4 You”] and was like, “Put that on the list right now.” Anyways, I ended up doing a single with ELHAE. The idea was, we wanna go on tour. So the whole game plan was, “Hey, me and you, we’re gonna hit our B markets separately but let’s go hit our A markets together. So let’s do a song, get everybody excited for the tour.”

So that song, “Favourite,” did well enough online that we thought, maybe we’ll do a little short project. We always talked about it, we grew up together, all this stuff. So I would have been focusing on my album at that point, and I had already kinda started on it, and we both had kids at that point. He hadn’t started his album, and I wasn’t necessarily full throttle, so I was like, in my spare time, I can do five or six songs why not?

Were you feeling any pressure to just focus on your album?

Because I was making music and active in creating and putting things out there, it didn’t feel like, “Oh, you need to do something.” Plus [the label] heard the music that was being made so there wasn’t pressure in that manner, but I had high pressure on myself to make a good project, for sure. I don’t want it ever to be a situation again where from album to album it’s that long [of a break].

You have a special relationship with ELHAE — tell me about how you guys connected.

We met when we were either three or four. Our parents were both Air Force and went to the same church, and I don’t know which turtles they were but we both had on Ninja Turtle suspenders. So that was the first thing that made us talk to each other. So our parents were already friends, and we just hung out a lot anyway. When I moved in ’96, I saw him one time when I was 9, one more time when I was 12, then I moved back to Georgia when I was 14. From there that’s when we really built our friendship to what it is today. Been that way ever since.

This break was kinda surprising because If You Feel felt like a rather big moment for you. You got some pretty major cosigns from artists like Joe Budden, it felt like things were heating up for your career. Did you feel that you had lost that momentum at all when you finally dropped HunnyMoon Mountain?

I didn’t feel anything was hot after If You Feel, which sucks cause at that point it was my best album. It was still in the midst of COVID, so when I went to get back out on the road. I just decided, “Hey, I know we can’t do it like we used to, but I wanna do five shows, we can do all the COVID restrictions. Let’s do smaller venues,” that was the whole game plan just to get back in front of people. Some cities were fully vaccinated, some were one shot, so we know we’re not gonna sell out every city just because of how people are about that stuff.

Even still, I think maybe two cities were around a 50% capacity, while two more sold out, and one did about 80 – 90%, still. So I’m thinking, “This is going great! Everything is amazing, sell outs during COVID!” As we got to head back out on the road in 2023, I basically was penalized by the venues for going smaller and for the numbers in the cases where it was COVID restrictions. They don’t consider the moment, they just say: “This is the ticket history.” So I’m legitimately starting all over on the U.S. touring front. I felt like I was back at zero and needed to stoke a new flame to get things going.

How are you feeling now with the new album out? From my perspective, it seems like you’re still not really at that taking off point yet. Is that frustrating at all considering what happened?

I’d say yes, but I also don’t feel that the opportunity for this album to take me there has passed. We will see how people react with the tour and everything. We’ll see what that really means to my fanbase and if they’ve shared it with people who’ll become new fans. So, from the prospect of me being big on the internet, I’m not that, but it doesn’t always tell a full story. Monthly listeners doesn’t always tell a full story. There are people who have more than me that would love to open on my tour. There’s people [who have] less than me that are making more money.

Again, I don’t feel the opportunity to see a launch or next step in this career has passed with this album. But even if it turns out that way, and I don’t mean to make direct comparisons, but in my mind I think, “Okay Leon Thomas’ Electric Dusk or Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange.” Channel Orange didn’t do what Blonde did, and I’m not in their stratosphere, but the idea that this album is the necessary foundation for what could be.

Did the album feel foundational when you were making it?

As I was making it, I wouldn’t say so. Because when it comes to the individual records it’s really hard for me to pick out, “Oh, this is the big record” — because the album is such a story. It works so much better together then they do separately, honestly, but because it’s hard for people to put an album together that way, that’s why it feels so big to me when I listen to it.

What’s the story being told on this album? It feels very linear.

It’s really the story of being in a relationship that sucks at the moment, but you want to stay in it. So what does that look like? We know what it looks like when we wanna quit, cause we get out of there. We’ve seen break-ups and divorce, all of those things. We know what it’s like to be happy! We hear about that all the time in songs. We don’t hear very much about getting through the thick of it with this person we actually do wanna be with, and don’t wanna let go of. So I’ve been telling the story of how my friend told me him and his fiancée were in a bad spot, and he just wanted to get a good memory going.

So they went to Disneyland. Happiest place on Earth, and they’re not having a good time together. So the idea that you could be with the person you wanna be with, in a surrounding that’s supposed to be happy, but not? I’m like, what the heck? That blew my mind, and that created the entire concept of HunnyMoon Mountain. You can view it as a theme park, where, if you wanna take the mountain literally, the mountain is commitment.

On “State of the Will” you sing a lot about the endurance required to maintain these relationships. I’m curious, outside of your romantic relationships, if this patience translates over to your bond with music?

That’s a constant with my music. I can’t tell you how often I’m like, “Do I wanna be front-facing anymore?” I could write forever, but do I want to record, put together marketing plans, shoot 800 videos, front money for a tour, figure out the different budgets? Do I wanna do all that as a front-facing artist or do I just wanna write songs and collect some royalty and pub? I face that a lot, but there’s definitely an endurance. What’s that 1975 song? “I Couldn’t Be More in Love.” That song is about him and the fans, and I think that song is a good encapsulation of [this]. They’re super successful, and I think every artist is gonna go through this question of, “Do I wanna do it this way? Do I wanna do it this long? Is it worth it right now?” The endurance is necessary.

On If You Feel you sang a lot about questioning your relationship to faith. You touch on God in a different way on HunnyMoon, so I’m wondering what your relationship to God is like now? Especially now that you’re a dad!

There’s an element of faith that when you’re not a parent you keep hearing about. I had only just been a son and I get it technically what it’s supposed to mean, but once I became a father, I was like, “Oh, there is literally nothing this kid can do where I’ll never love them anymore.” What can my child do that I just won’t love them or accept them? That part, I don’t wanna say grew my relationship with God, but it changed my thinking on that aspect much more. There are things I can relate so much all day long of what I’m saying to my daughter to the way God actually feels about me. When I’m thinking I could be unlovable for this reason and that reason, if I literally just apply that same thinking to my child, it doesn’t make any sense!

So that’s why that imagery of God being The Father makes so much sense. Understanding the love, the care, the provision, in that way, it’s so rooted. I went and looked back at financially what happened each year for me to be able to make any money, and I can do that for a decade. I can do that for the last ten years, on just music. The proof of it is, yeah have I put some work towards it? You have to, but at the same time, I don’t provide for myself. I put myself in position, but I can’t make all of these things happen for myself. I believe God has given me opportunity as I keep working. There’s ten years of proof to show for it. That to me, with him being a father that provides and now me being a father that provides for my children, I just see the mirror.

You seem a lot more satisfied with your relationship to faith on this album.

Even on If You Feel, it wasn’t that I wasn’t satisfied. When I said, “Tweak my christianity in Jesus’s name,” it wasn’t that I wasn’t happy in my faith. I just felt that I had learned it wrong and I needed to relearn, and that’s what I had been doing over those years was relearning. Still, every day I’m still finding things I didn’t realize before that I see now.

What’s your relationship like to contemporary R&B right now? Where do you think your place is within it?

I think it’s healthier than ever, there’s been these different moments in time where a main theme kinda stuck out more than the other. So the 90s and early 2000s it was the begging and the yearning, where as when we got towards the 2010s it got darker, and now I feel like we’ve finally come to a point where it’s all kinda merged, where you can hear all of that all from the same artist on the same album. All these different artists we have, all their styles are all acceptable. I love Chase Shakur, and Cleo Sol, who are both on different spectrums of R&B, but they’re both R&B. I don’t know where my place is necessarily in it, I’m in there somewhere. But I know there’s space for me within it.

You previously said you’re known as the R&B singer that respects women. I can’t help but see with all these themes on the album, you’re very much still that. Do you ever worry being known as that boxes you in?

I’ve kinda let it be known more recently I’ve just never cared for that. At the time, the PR I was working with, it made sense for marketing to say, “Hey, this is your difference and we’re gonna lean in on it.” I felt that it made me come across as too perfect or didn’t give me room to make mistakes or be a person, and I’ve always felt that way. Even now, I think that’s a bit of what I rebelled [against] with the album. I’m a jerk on the first few songs. Even with “Good Intentions,” I’m just telling somebody I’m miserable with them, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Then you get into “The One That I Fell For” and I’m just sarcastic the entire first verse. “Take Her Love” I’m blaming her the whole time, I’m not even taking responsibility. To a degree, I’m stripping some of that away. Not that I’m not respectful, I’m gonna do my best, but the perfection of, “Oh, he just has these great love songs.” In theory. But also I’m still human.