tackling on too many things — that’s never been of issue. but as of late, he feels nothing short than being spread out so thinly that his knees start buckling with each step that drags him through gold star’s hallways. call it a physical reaction, or maybe, it’s just the effect of his fifth americano of the day and a cesspool of work left to be unfinished.
luckily, he’s packed his smoke break to the brim. the stench probably lingers, but then again, he’s never given two shits as to how he presents, nonetheless to a label mate he barely knows.
they’re better off being called strangers with the abysmal interactions. yet, his resume consists of nothing more than what feels like: gold star in-house producer number one. (he makes himself at home when he opens the door, tosses a nod in lieu of a formal greeting, finding some sort of fixture in the empty seat by the production table).
“so, i’m gonna be upfront now. i’ve created so much shit in the past weeks from reggae to classical mixtures to edm — the only idea i have left is city pop. inspired by japanese pop from the ‘80s.” he tilts his view to meet hers, a beat of silence for the response before he cuts that short too. “a stretch from your ballading career, but take it or leave it as you will.”
@minjungfmd
— no blueberries lyric & melody verification
— probably around august(?)
it’s nighttime again. if he had the energy for it, he might read some sentimentality into that, but as it is, he cynically sees it as a given. he doesn’t have anything to do these days, as a consequence of bc finally giving in to his incessant requests for time off when it’d finally started to look like it would affect their bottom line, but other people are busy. they have lives. equinox is making a comeback soon, or they already have. he hasn’t been doing a good job of keeping up. or rather, he’s purposefully avoided news about the idol world. if he’s disconnecting, he has every intention of doing that fully.
he clicks around through the files on his computer, searching for what he’d named that track he’d been working on before. with a relaxation of the tension in his shoulder he hadn’t realized he was holding until it was gone, he pulls it up the track in his program and finally shifts his focus from his computer screen to minjung. “i have this track, but i’ve been having trouble putting words and a melody to it. care to give it a shot with me? it’s supposed to be for my next album, if that ever happens. i want to capture the feeling of the, i don’t know, the horror of... struggling to connect. people who don’t know you and you don’t know them, or even people you do know, but there’s that wall there and it kind of pisses you off but makes you wanna... run away from it basically at the same time. like distance... consuming you kind of. the little things about human connection that fuck you up in the head because it’s all just... fucked and eats you alive when you think about it, you get me?”
location: mostly his apartment studio (#sololivin #ilivealonecallhim)
date: oct-nov 2021
word count: 1254
tldr; verif for alice’s celebrity, full melody & arrangement! alice asks sung to write a debut for her and sung fixates on perfecting the alice model
over the year, sung felt like he’d been asked to create for other idols much more often than he’d ever expected. he wasn’t sure yet how he was supposed to react to the change. up until then, he’d continued to be surprised and grateful whenever someone specifically wanted to work with him, whether it be for songwriting, choreographing, or even appearing in their music videos. some, like minjung, he’d come to almost expect working on music with, whether it made it to the final album cuts or not. others caught him entirely by surprise, like alice.
a member of his favorite group saying she valued his songwriting skills, asking for him to write her not only a song, but her debut solo release. as grateful as he may have felt, the notion was also quite daunting. adding on to it, he’d been given a starting point, in her own lyrics. double-edged, it could be, to finish a song rather than start one. while it narrowed down the possibilities into something more manageable, it also added the challenge to be mindful of the original author’s intent.
for a debut, in sung’s opinion, it should reflect the artist. in a group, the concept and skills that shine most would be on the forefront in order to accurately depict what people could expect to see in the future if they decide to follow the group. the same applies to soloists, yet even more intimately. personality and specified image had to combine with the unique skillset from the person.
he had to put more thought into writing for alice than he might for another person, which is why the day he received the lyrics, he holed himself up in his studio. in his favorite swivel chair, legs pulled up, they functioned as a table setting for the notebook upon them. along the first empty page of the booklet were two bulleted lists of notes, qualities of alice that he might want to incorporate into the piece.
one side of the page had skill based notes about her timbre, approximation of vocal areas he could surmise she felt most comfortable in, vocal limitations he could think of, notes reminding him of references of her halfway-to-raps. while he didn’t want to stretch her too far for a debut of all things, he needed to find the right balance between comfort and sonic interest.
the other listing focused on personality, styles, and concepts. at the top of the list was sweet. at the forefront of her personality, sung would think almost anyone who met alice would describe her as such. she’d been placed in the sweet group pre-debut, and even if that may have been skill based, it was the right placement in more ways than one. in other various bullets, sung mentioned concepts he felt she stood out in most, concepts from other groups he felt like she could pull off well. writing those led to noticing a commonality between many of his additions to have been songs from the latter half of the previous generation of idol music. he could easily see her owning the bright and heady stylization that dominated concepts in 2014 and 2015. of course, the eventual concept direction of the track wasn’t his to choose, but there were inspirations he could pull from that time nonetheless.
the gears, and therefore pen, turned towards sound. from the concept he was thinking of, the sound often focused on aggressive bubblegum pop, but around the same time, there were other sounds popping up. r&b picked up steam, especially in western releases. girl groups and soloists were doing more sexy concepts than recent times. electronic music had also taken a different route from the style that overwhelmed the turn into the 2010s. before, it was very... t-pain, lady gaga style, harsh and overt, autotune used like another drum or keyboard. transitioning within the mid 2010s, he hadn’t seen it used much in idol music, but in the west, a softening of the same styles used earlier in the decade and right before. thinking about it then, that trend did end up coming into idol music, only, much more recently. many group songs of the last couple of years mixed edm in with their music, first in chorus drops, then in chorus anti drops. while he underlined anti drops, he wasn’t sure if it would fit in with this release. alice may be enough a charismatic dancer to fill an empty space, but breaking a song for dance didn’t seem fitting for the ethereal, gentle-souled lyrics he’d been handed. he’d have to come back to that idea later.
after about an hour of writing down different thoughts, and semi-categorizing them by current usability, he decided the place to start was to invoke the underlying energy of mid 2010s pop edm. he shifted to his computer, and started by creating a few different beats. for then, he’d let himself run wild with them, so that like the passage of time, he could soften the sound later into the right era he was looking for. sung drafted up layer after layer of different beats before retiring for the night.
given idol schedules loved to get in the way, it was another few days before he had the time to continue working on the song, though he couldn’t deny that he kept thinking about it over time anyway. mostly, in the vocals. sung couldn’t be sure what the instrumental would sound like yet, and mixing the two was part of the process, but whenever he found himself humming a tune, walking between schedules, in the shower, washing dishes, he’d stop to ask himself if it sounded suitable for alice, and if the answer was yes, he’d record what he’d hummed. so, by the time he got back to the studio, he had gotten a little further in the process than where he’d left it.
he uploaded his humming clips to his computer, though, for the moment, they’d sit almost unused. the first thing he needed to do was look through his beats again, narrow them down, and rework them. looking through them again, a couple were a little too turn of the decade, which made his job easier, though after getting to only a few, the decision became more difficult. instead, he gave them each a trial run, reshaping and adding onto each just a little to see what might be the easiest to turn in the direction he was thinking, in the end leaving him with the victor.
the more he filled out the original beat, though, the more he thought about anti drops, and the more he wondered why he should stick to an exact formula? what constituted a pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, verse, was completely his to decide. with the right amount of stretching in the pre-chorus and chorus, an anti drop could work. it would also be the easiest place to show the song’s inspiration, and give alice some time to breathe, especially since this was her debut. he’d spoken to more than enough other idols who debuted solo and felt like their stamina wasn’t taken into account. sung wanted alice to grow through this release, and whatever came next, but he wanted to be respectful while he did so.
a debut was meant to be a good experience, and if sung had the opportunity to further that in any way, he needed to put in the extra effort to make it great. he really hoped she’d like the piece.
summary / melody + production for @fmdhayi‘s mianhae.
wc / 1012
the melody begins how she meets him.
inside a cruddy bar, surrounded by mutual strangers. she doesn’t know why steps out that day, just know she does at the expense of a cruddy routine of unfortunate circumstances. the rain when she gets her hair done for the next comeback, and the humidity of the heat rising with each step she takes past familiar faces and new ones. the rain that starts to downpour, accompany the round of drinks that line up. the explosion of cheers for new beginnings right as she finds the empty seat next to his.
it starts like repetition, the keys of the piano.
engrained in habits when she doesn’t lend a look over overtly, only to pass peeks in secret. he has dimples, she notes — they dig deep, and when her gaze becomes caught red-handed, the only thing she has at her disposal is the same primed smile her father used to give her when he found her hiding behind the scarlet curtains of a child.
she hides the melody inside the light-hearted touches of the keys that continue to follow the jazzy scheme of wannabe jazz from the 1930’s.
they remind her of him.
a summation of late night talks that fall blue like jazz inside her daze of ex-lovers, and ruined relationships. ruination at her own hands, and she lets her fingers trickle down the keys in erratic beats. because nothing’s been smooth like jazz throughout the course of back and forth years lost in translation.
missed timings, half-chances. hope she rests her heart on, only for the transiency of it all to rush like sanguine tinged cheeks falling from her face into bleak white. it’s murky territories, they tread on — always murky when she lets the rest of the melody fall into some pattern.
patterns are scary things, they fall into habituation. and everything becomes discourse as she waits for the pattern to halt, and shift into a turmoil of unexpected endings.
she hasn’t touched a piano in how long — months of lapsed conversation. nothing’s changed, she’s just become toned down outside the press, and behind the curtains again, this time back stage. she spits it out, just like poetry in motion. except her excerpt doesn’t follow the prose of plath or poe, and it certainly doesn’t sound like anything of sinatra or etta james.
it comes in wayward motion, just as her hands transition into a slow shift from the chords to the pressure her foot places on the pedal. it exudes, blends out into the silence of empty thoughts for things she doesn’t have left.
only memories guide one note after the other, and everything falls into place like it’s nothing short of muscle memory when she colors the melody with melancholy.
because melancholic endings are all she knows, all he knows. and maybe, that’s why she falls back into the habit of empty jazz music that plays through the speakers like she knows more than she’s giving up. context for nothing except the space of silence that takes her back to where she sees him best — empty moonlight in the break of night, like cinderella the clock strikes twelve and everything bursts back to reality.
there’s the whimsy divided into the patterns of the songs. the staccato of the rap that fragments the smooth whimsy of pretty keys. it’s a clash of two differing patterns, yet somehow in the dissonance, comes the cohesion she’s always known him to be.
figures, there’s another song she writes for a boy who doesn’t care.
only, this time she tells her story in-between the lines of notes because in the end, they’ve never found the right words or the right times to say sorry. instead, everything becomes nothing more than the short blend of lost time, wrong words, in-between context, and always lost inside the abyss of silence.
she only tells him the things she couldn’t say, except, she stands alone inside her room, keys in her hand, letting the jazz fill her bones like they used to. but past to present, and her bones feel empty while the chord transitions press on, and the beat never picks up into the recourse she wanted all along.
music becomes cathartic when she wants it to be, and late night blues have her holed up into the bungalow of her apartment. movies don’t feel right when five minutes passes, and she lets the words of empty lost lovers reuniting play in the background as she slides her feet one by one back to the studio. she doesn’t know why she keeps coming back to run the same lines of melodies or the same juxtaposition. all she knows is, she keeps coming back.
still no words, she leaves them to the new owner of the song. instead, all she has is the beginnings of the subtle bass line ticking in tandem with her keys against the table. steady like a metronome, and she realizes: she’s still writing the same stupid song for the same stupid boy.
patterns are terrible, and when she catches herself in the middle of a new form — grace lends itself to her when she lets herself carry on. stability, and the foundation to an unwritten story, he’s always been there keeping the tempest waters at bay in the mirage of a calm sea. the metronome ticks on, nature runs its course.
no lyrics, instead she fills the guide with the hum of a low voice. quiet and somber, she ends up painting herself in the blue notes of murky territory, one by one. the jazz inspired chords, the low level of the bass, and the somber hums — sums up the course they’ve taken thus far. and the song itself mirrors the only footsteps they’ve ever known.
she knows where the ending is, but her heart doesn’t want to swallow reality. instead, she lends the ending to unfinished business because nine times out of ten, she’d let it fade instead of letting the abrupt stop render her a shell of empty memories in the end.
it’s a terrible cliche to live by, she knows. writing across the pages one by one into the same shades of blues and greys — bad boys, sad girls. those are the fairytale endings that disney doesn't write about, and the ones she has to carve out from her own experiences.
too bad experience means letting the edges of heartbreak and the taste of lost hope settle into the bitter aftermath of what subsides on her tongue, and what runs through her mind all in slow motion.
she hasn’t picked up a pen in a while. hasn’t sketched, hasn’t written. words don’t come as easily when she’s forced into the rollercoaster emotions of shooting straight up, only to come crashing down. the crash comes into effect in ripple motions, one rough sway. and the rest comes like muscle memory — something familiar, like she knows it a little all too well.
maybe that’s why when she has the pen in front of her hand, and the blank page, the only words that entice themselves across become the same words reverberating through her head the second she decided to play a game with the devil.
if i take one step closer
take a couple of steps back
it’s like this again, sick of love
and maybe, that’s the remedy she’s been searching for all along. sifting through the in-betweens of what-ifs, and lost chances. bad timing an excuse for the abyss of words that lie in the bridge of silence. each step feels like one languid backwards motion, and by the end of it, all she has is where she’s started — the same bitterness that subsides in her stomach when she reminds herself to swallow it whole, even if it gets lodged into choked up sentences in the process.
you act vaguely
bad boy, bad boy, bad boy
i get sentimental for no reason
sad girl, sad girl sad girl
tonight too up alone
it’s a crutch of volatile emotions. she knows, just as the pen digs deeper into the paper and she’s relegated to that of a child scribbling nothings about a boy in a diary. rudimentary processes, and growing up just means transfixing old hobbies into productivities when she’s humming the words with the melody in her mind. and nothing excuses her when she can hear his voice in-between passing conversations, little facets and pieces she weaves together into excuses.
because really, maybe, that’s how she let herself to get stuck here in the first place. mulling over missed text messages and lapses of radio silence — the only thing remaining: her pride when she writes one more song about a stupid bad boy, and a sad sad girl.
how he’s landed himself in this predicament, he doesn’t know.
the only facts are strewn in front of him in an unmastered piece of a song, and his current state of life pinning him as a yes man who can’t say no. or maybe, he just hasn’t said no because any sense of creative freedom is ablated, and any morsel of being liberated to creating something worth the bare minimum, he picks up at no cost.
so, he stands in front of a computer with nothing more than the different takes and the different cuts. the melody of a strong vocal line hitting, and he’s left to pick up the pieces and smoothen the edges to make some sort of blend seamless.
it’s a habit of his, how he stares at the same line melody. knows how it goes in his head, could sing and recite it himself if he could — yet, there’s a certain hesitation when he plays. presses pause, thinks. mules inside the silence only to repeat the process.
it’s a few clicks, and he likes the overlay of vocals. there’s a certain charm to suji’s voice in city pop (he’s never said out loud to her face, wouldn’t ever say it) — power vocals, and he messes around with the underlay of some backup harmonies they recorded earlier. safe to say, it’s all put to use with how he plays makeshift tetris, filling in the gaps of the melody with her voice to add to the build up of it all.
but as per usual, nothing remains synchronous when the nagging feeling of something missing in the intro puts him back at square one.
repeat the process, he plays. listens, ruminates. only to fall victim to the fixed settings on the side of his screen — city pop, and the essence lies in the time spent of his non-stop fixation on old 90’s japanese pop. nostalgia is what the track bleeds, a tinge of what’s missing. so, he clicks further, filling in the lapses of lost time with filters till he settles on the right one.
old school record, not the vinyls. but the tapes that emulate the same process of play, rewind. pause, resume.
there’s the coloration that blends into the beginning transition, where her voice exudes the dominance within the beginnings of the first verse. he listens, doesn’t pause this time. instead, lets the song play out in its entirety.
whatever’s going on in his current life: it’s all pressed on pause.
each day comes with a harrowing reminder that he’s booked. has shit to do, yet the list never ends when his notes are scrawled with cheapened handwriting of different projects here and there that he’s signed onto. bc, gold star — the two companies that hold the bane of his existence within each request for a different beat, a different song. something new and fresh, yet enough to hold the current fan base stable.
he hates it. it being defined as being the perpetual sell out that creates music for money — a stark contrast to how this all began. yet, despite any inner turmoil, he’s still landed himself right down the streak of different songs lined for different groups. nothing’s changed, and today’s no different when he marches into his home studio, nothing more than another cup of iced coffee standing in his vicinity, a senile cat that stares him down from across the room, and the same damn notebook that becomes the blueprint of his days.
there’s one group, then there’s another. there’s a soloist, then another — he comes to tell himself he’s become less of a no man, and more of a yes signing different contractual obligations his body can’t keep out with. technically, he should be drowning — strip the artist of any creative freedom, and leave him starving for more. except, it turns to be the opposite when the images are already heavily engrained in his head, and he remembers nothing more than the lamenting meetings going through what’s needed of each track.
it feels like he’s at a standstill, except he’s not when his eyes scan through the different to-dos. a few, he avoids in the entirety, and a few, he’s already started the draft for. (creative freedom, and inability to focus on one thing for too long leaves him with too many drafts, not enough finishes).
so, he decides something new.
one name points on the list, hayi’s solo. truth be told, there’s an feeling hinging on his stomach that tells him to forget the contract and let her be within the monotony of any other bc track. then, there’s the other of something he refuses to call loyalty that leads him to contemplate what he can manage with what he’s got left in his head.
so, he compromises, finding some drafts he’s created in the folder of different songs. reggae, tossed out. city pop, not for her. some weird latin music mix he created in the spur of the moment after learning to take one shot of tequila, yeah — that shit’s out.
somehow, he lands back on the different samples of ultraviolet tracks he’s crafted. in turn, what becomes is another same iteration of an edm song gone awry. it doesn’t phase him, at least — not when hours go into the process. pull out a mic, and somehow he’s gotten himself the beginnings of a guide vocal when he begins the song softly, humming a tune that drags on longer than the buildup itself.
it’s an elegance to the beginning, the edges feathered out when he lightens the words to a brisk murmur at the ends. like writing with an actual fountain pen that’s hinging on it’s last trace of ink. the mumbles drop, and in his mind, he relegates it to dropping a coin on top of a buliding and turning away from the aftermath before the big boom.
the big boom comes in waves when he hits contrast with the different intonation now peaking upwards instead of down. it’s a rollercoaster. a juxtaposition of contradictions when the melody begins downhill only to fall straight upward with a buildup of a voice, bolstering louder.
he re-records the guide vocals, no lyrics. it all just poses itself in mumbles and hums, his voice still exacerbating through the different echoes of growing louder. each piece finesses itself into a great buildup — one he knows becomes stereotypical of all ultraviolet songs: the beat drop. no melody there, instead, he harnesses the steady cavity of the loud beats echoed through the speakers of the room. it’s like some makeshift gangnam club, at least from what he hears in story.
big notes that blast through dance, in all it’s e-flat glory. there’s some touch of confidence that blooms through the power drop, contradicts the subtle introversion that bleeds the beginning.
he keeps the bpm slow and steady, there’s an emphasis he puts at the drop. no rhyme or reason aside from the fact that it becomes the status quo of any edm song he’s created in his lifetime. and it’s another to add to the list.
yet, still not enough to deter him. because in hindsight, the hours spent in the morning become relegated to nothing more than re-recording the guiding melody through each burst of voice and docile contrast the carry throughout the basis of the beat.
contradictions is what he lands on.
a few days of listening to the song, ditching it. only to fall back to the tracks, there’s the contradiction he wants to keep. it’s the lack of confidence that builds into the burst of noise that contains the chorus.
yet, somehow amongst the contradictions, he manages to cut corners. it’s the base, the template carved through the verse into the chorus in the beginning, only to shove in room for some semblance of a rap in between the lines of a shitty excuse for a hiphop line drawn down. the only piece to topple after falls back into the stark insert of the chorus, and beat change back into the edm-heavy lines.
then, to the bridge.
and it becomes a process of habit rather than creativity with how the song poses itself into the lines of any other track in his folder. the bridge leans back into the bolstered notes of more heavy edm.
leaning back into his chair, and he listens to what’s possessed in the screen. it’s concise, packs a punch rendered incoherent with inconsistencies. it’s a fluid motion of different emotions played through the different connotations of genres. the verses lined in pop, the lack of confidence. the build up that paints a picture of tasteful arrogance. the mini-rap held together in meekness in hiphop. then, the finale that lines boldness through it’s power.
he’s not certain it’s suitable for anyone aside from ultraviolet. yet, somehow, nothing explains for how he continues to adjust here and there before lining her voice with the finishes of seamless transitions. one after the next, and somehow he’s managed to create frankensteins monster, a beacon of what creativity lies with his hard drive.
write enough songs, and you’ll soon imagine.
he thinks about scrapping it, throwing it out and starting into a blank canvas. but even that dies when he hears hayi’s voice blend smoothly with the contrasting hues of the drop. so, instead, he lets it still — head tossed back with nothing more than the echoes of a rough draft (something tells him: don’t throw it away.)
habits don’t die easily, and the lingering feeling subduing the file straight to trash leads him to work on the process instead. clicks here and there, he figures — if anything, it suits her more than it’ll suit any one else.
so, he keeps it. lets it be, and makes do with what he has.
she’s not ignorant to murky waters, and where she stands now becomes a testament to playing with fire. tip toeing between the lines, inside the studio space — the canvas lies blank, and the words don’t fill the void like silence does. iterations upon different word play, and each one feels like a sham lined with pretty little lies of never-ending fairytales.
songs writes when inspiration dawns, but when inspiration swallows you whole, what’s left is nothing more than deflected gazes and a lack of honesty that dissolves the second she opens her mouth.
“i don’t like sharing my creative process, but there’s a few lines in my head, gnawing. and if i don’t share, i feel like i might collect the remnants and burst, so just listen — don’t tell me you hate it, or don’t tell me you like it.”
a preface, a wall she builds before the wreckage ensues. the melody’s already engrained in her head, a picture she paints of a figure that stands an arms length away. “i’ve been fighting for quite a while, somewhere twisted coding. i don’t know what’s in my mind.” she pauses, lets her teeth press against her lip. “hypothetically, it’s song about a sad girl — why she’s sad? because she can’t figure a boy out.”
