Başar Keklik

Lyrics before chords

Keklik's route into music ran backwards through the usual order. He was writing song lyrics in primary school, long before he had an instrument, and only picked up a guitar in his ninth-grade year, after a friend talked him into learning. For a while he composed without being able to play what he was hearing: classical guitar was the way in, and production came later, learned alongside the writing rather than handed to him by anyone else.

He has been open about who pointed him there. He credits Onur Can Özcan as the direct reason he started making music at all, and names Can Ozan and Kamuran Akkor among the people he admires — the Akkor reference placing him closer to the Turkish melodramatic ballad tradition than to anything imported. What he says he values in all three is that they handle their own work, which is also the model he has followed: every single in his catalogue is credited to him as both writer and composer.

The other fact he has not hidden is that none of this has been a full-time job. Speaking in June 2025, at the point his release schedule was at its most relentless, he described working ten to twelve hours a day at something else entirely and treating music as the separate thing he actually wanted to do. He put the frequency of his releases down to appetite rather than strategy.

The 19demo run

The recorded trail starts on 28 May 2023 with "Bir Gecenin Rüyası", issued under the 19demo tag — a name that tells its own story about how finished these recordings were meant to sound. Nothing followed for nearly eighteen months. Then, in the space of five weeks at the end of 2024, three singles landed: "Geçersen Bi'gün Karşısından Aşkın" on 15 November, "Özür Dilerim" on 6 December and "Ardından" on 20 December. "Ardından" is the one that did the early work of putting his name in front of people who had not gone looking for it.

The break came on 3 January 2025 with "Biz Ayrıldık Müjgan, Bilmiyorlar", the first release under his own name rather than the demo imprint. The title lifts a register of Turkish screen melodrama and applies it without irony, which is roughly what the song does musically too — a three-and-a-half-minute ballad built on a single wound. It remains his most-played track on Deezer nearly two years on, and it is still the title most often attached to his name in search.

Nine singles in eleven months

What followed through 2025 was one of the heavier release schedules an unsigned Turkish songwriter has run recently: "Yeni Birini Bulmuşsun" on 1 April, "Korkak" on 26 April, "Madem Sevmiyorsun, Git" on 13 June, "Yere Düştüm" on 18 July, "Üç Çocuk" on 22 August, "Nihayet Hanım" on 26 September and "İntikam Alıyorsun" on 28 November. Nine singles inside eleven months, all self-released, all written and composed by him.

"Korkak" shows how little of that pace was planning. He has said the song was composed around a year and a half before it came out, then shelved and forgotten, and only finished in the weeks before release after he went back through his own demos and found it again. He describes his writing as story-based and rooted in things that actually happened, with the dramatising done afterwards — which fits a catalogue in which almost every title is a line of dialogue from the end of a relationship.

The subject matter barely moves across the run: leaving, being left, regret, the specific humiliation of being replaced. What changes is the production, which tightens noticeably from the 19demo material to the 2025 singles — closer-mic'd vocals, arrangements that stay out of the way of the words.

A label, and a slower year

March 2026 marked the first structural change in how the records come out. "Ağlıyor Sevgilim", released on 27 March 2026, is the first single credited to the Hoze label rather than to Keklik himself. "Ben Sana Yeminliyim" followed on 22 May 2026, and "Dayanamam Artık" — the most recent release — on 25 September 2026. It currently sits at the top of his Apple Music song ranking, above "Biz Ayrıldık Müjgan, Bilmiyorlar".

The arithmetic of that year is worth noting: three singles in 2026 against nine in 2025. The drop coincides with the label arrangement and with the first serious attempt to put him on stage, and it suggests a shift from releasing whatever was finished towards scheduling around shows.

His standing is lopsided in a way that is typical of artists who grew on short-form video and Spotify playlisting rather than through press. His Spotify artist page listed roughly 196,800 monthly listeners in October 2026, while his Deezer profile has gathered 29 followers — the audience is concentrated on a couple of platforms and has almost no footprint elsewhere. There is no album, no EP and no awards record to speak of: fifteen singles across three and a half years, and now a touring diary.

Playing it in rooms

The autumn run is six dates and six cities, and the venue list is a fair statement of where he is: SoldOut Performance Hall in İzmir on 27 October, Hayal Kahvesi in Kocaeli on 12 November, Konya PSM on 18 November, Holly Stone Performance Hall in Antalya on 19 November, The Keep in Çanakkale on 25 November and Hayal Kahvesi Bandırma on 26 November. All six were on sale as of mid-October 2026, with a floor price of 399 lira across every date — no tiering, no premium pricing, the same number in Antalya as in Çanakkale.

These are performance halls and music bars rather than arenas, and the billing is single-name: no support act is listed on any of the six ticket pages, and no running time is published for any of them. The weekend clustering of the November dates — Wednesday in Kocaeli, then two consecutive Wednesday-and-Thursday pairs, then a Wednesday and Thursday to close — reads as a routed run rather than scattered one-offs, which is new for him.