The public video record is unusually spare. Yours Truly’s surviving Vimeo upload is titled simply “Nick Hakim,” leaving the song name and setting to the performance itself. Contemporary reports supply the particulars: the crew visited Hakim’s Brooklyn apartment, spoke with him about the relationship pain behind “Cold,” and filmed him performing with an acoustic guitar and drum machine. SoulBounce described the clip as both an interview and a stripped-down session.
That domestic scale makes the video valuable, but not because “Cold” was unknown. Hakim’s studio recording had been public for months. The session offered a second introduction: one that removed the layered arrangement and brought the song’s internal mechanism close to the surface. Guitar establishes the frame, the machine supplies an unyielding pulse, and Hakim’s voice carries nearly all the movement between composure and hurt.
This is not a performance built around a startling transformation or a display of vocal force. Its distinction lies in how little Hakim needs to change. The melody holds without the studio recording’s harmonies, piano and accumulated atmosphere. Reduced to a few elements, “Cold” still feels complete because its drama comes from tension rather than density—the contrast between a gentle delivery and a lyric about emotional distance, and between human hesitation and a beat that cannot hesitate with him.
A second introduction, not a debut
“Cold” and “The Light” first appeared through Okayplayer on January 24, 2014. That premiere identified Hakim as a singer-songwriter from the Washington, D.C., area and presented the pair as the first music from his forthcoming solo project, Where Will We Go. Okayplayer heard a deliberately washed-out strain of soul in “Cold,” led by blues-shaped guitar and a subdued vocal performance.
By the time of the Yours Truly film, then, listeners could already compare two distinct presentations of the song. The studio version opens outward: guitar, piano and layered voices accumulate without disturbing its unhurried pace. The Line of Best Fit’s June 11 coverage emphasized those expanding harmonies and embedded the Yours Truly session directly beneath its account of the recording. The apartment performance moves in the opposite direction. Instead of adding color, it tests how much can be removed before the song loses its character.
Very little is lost. The programmed rhythm may be a practical way for one musician to perform without a band, but it also sharpens the composition’s central contradiction. A breakup can suspend a person inside an old conversation; the machine continues in measured time. Hakim sings between those conditions. His phrasing bends around the grid, while the grid remains indifferent to every pause and held syllable.
The acoustic guitar is equally functional. It does not attempt to reproduce every contour of the recorded arrangement. Its repeated figure marks the harmony clearly enough that Hakim can concentrate on tone, timing and breath. That restraint prevents the session from becoming a generic unplugged remake. The arrangement is smaller, but the emotional argument is intact.
Heartbreak without a tidy villain
Early notices understandably treated “Cold” as a breakup song. The session’s interview component also approached it through that experience. Hakim complicated the story later that month, however, explaining that the song did not describe one person so much as a mixture of several relationships. In his June 26 conversation with Interview, he characterized its ending as having an ironic or sarcastic kind of continuation rather than offering a clean statement of recovery.
That distinction changes how the performance lands. “Cold” is not a courtroom argument in which a singer presents evidence against an absent partner. Its language and delivery are less settled than that. Hakim sounds as though he is sorting through overlapping memories, with affection and disappointment occupying the same melodic space. The quietness is not emotional vagueness; it is what allows contradictory feelings to remain audible together.
The same interview places the song within a wider period of grief and spiritual uncertainty. Hakim connected Where Will We Go to deaths among relatives and friends, as well as to questions about religion and what might follow death. Okayplayer had recorded a similar explanation in January, when Hakim described the project as marking a time of loss within his family and community. Those accounts make it risky to reduce the early material to romantic melancholy alone. Heartbreak is one subject, but absence is the larger condition.
The apartment session does not spell out that broader context, nor does it need to. Its form already suits music preoccupied with what remains after somebody has gone. The empty space between guitar strokes matters. So does the contrast between a close, vulnerable voice and the impersonal regularity of the drum machine. The performance leaves gaps rather than filling them with exaggerated sorrow.
Hakim’s musical upbringing also resists a single genre explanation. He told Interview that his parents played guitar and sang older South American folk songs, while an older brother was involved with Washington’s hardcore-punk scene. Contemporary writers reached for soul, R&B, folk, blues, jazz and Motown when describing his work. In “Cold,” those names are best understood as overlapping materials: the intimacy of a folk performance, the harmonic warmth of soul, the patience of a slow R&B groove and a do-it-yourself willingness to let modest equipment carry a serious song.
The ensemble behind the solitary image
A musician alone in an apartment can encourage an overly simple origin story. The Yours Truly clip demonstrates that “Cold” works in isolation; it does not prove that Hakim’s early recordings were conceived or completed without collaborators. Later reporting gives the fuller picture.
WBUR’s account of the Where Will We Go sessions names Kyle Miles on bass, Jake Sherman on keys and organ, Jon Nellen on drums, and Jeremy Most and Joe Manzoli on guitar. Andrew Sarlo mixed and mastered the EPs. Hakim described the arranging as collaborative, and WBUR reported that the project developed gradually through visits to New York while he was still studying at Berklee.
Those credits help explain why the recorded “Cold” can be lush without sounding crowded. The musicians do not compete for attention; their parts preserve room around Hakim’s voice. The home performance reveals the framework beneath that collective arrangement. Its value is not that it supersedes the record, but that it shows the record’s atmosphere was built around a durable song rather than used to disguise an incomplete one.
Contemporary metadata also places Hakim and Sarlo together at the production level. DJBooth’s June 11 entry credits both as producers of “Cold” and describes an instrumental that remains warm despite the song’s mournful subject. That combination—heartbreak rendered through inviting sound—is precisely what survives when the arrangement is reduced. The acoustic session has less harmonic information, yet it retains the studio version’s refusal to equate sadness with severity.
The distinction between solitary presentation and collaborative construction matters for another reason. Hakim’s singing can make the song feel private enough to have been captured accidentally, but the performance is controlled. The placement of each instrumental element, the steadiness of the tempo and the patience of the vocal all reveal arrangement decisions. Intimacy here is a method, not an absence of craft.
One month before Where Will We Go Pt. 1
The session circulated at a precise point in Hakim’s first release campaign. It followed the January unveiling of “Cold” and “The Light,” but preceded the arrival of Where Will We Go Pt. 1. Both The Line of Best Fit and DJBooth listed the EP for July 14 through Earseed Records. Apple Music’s release record independently confirms that date, the Earseed copyright and a five-track, 17-minute program.
The project would ultimately form the first half of a pair. Hakim’s official discography lists Where Will We Go Pt. 1 and Pt. 2 as 2014 releases, followed by a combined compilation in 2015. That later catalog shape can make the two EPs look like a settled opening chapter. The June session catches something less orderly: a songwriter between an encouraging premiere and his first formal release, presenting one of the project’s key songs without the protection of its full recorded texture.
Later career summaries would identify those EPs as Hakim’s breakthrough. Stereogum’s 2017 interview reported that they brought wider attention, an opening opportunity with Maxwell and a deal with ATO. Hakim’s own recollection was more vulnerable than that streamlined progression suggests. He described making the music with friends, feeling nervous about releasing material so personal and being surprised by its reception.
The Yours Truly film preserves that uncertainty better than a retrospective résumé can. Nothing in the room announces a guaranteed ascent. The performance depends on a modest rhythm box, an acoustic instrument and Hakim’s willingness to keep the vocal exposed. There is no need to manufacture a breakthrough scene after the fact; the compelling detail is how provisional everything still feels.
Why the small room endures
“Cold” demonstrates a principle that would matter throughout Hakim’s work: sonic haze is most effective when something firm exists underneath it. In the studio recording, harmonies and reverberant instruments make the song feel suspended. In the apartment, rhythm and melody show the beams holding that atmosphere up.
The session also clarifies what restraint can communicate. Hakim does not resolve grief by singing louder, and the arrangement does not mark recovery with a dramatic lift. Instead, guitar, voice and machine remain in close conversation. The song moves forward without pretending the singer has reached an uncomplicated destination.
That is why this early document is more than a promotional acoustic take. It catches Hakim discovering how a private-scale performance can hold several kinds of absence at once—romantic separation, bereavement and spiritual doubt—without collapsing them into a single explanation. The room is small enough to expose every component. The feeling exceeds it.