Client: DAZED
Jeong Jaehyun, the K-pop idol known mononymously as JAEHYUN, likens writing lyrics on his debut solo album, J, to a game of ping-pong. He would sit with his team (“his crew”, as he affectionately calls them) as songs bubbled into being. They’d bat ideas around, letting them gain momentum, spin through meanings and back stories, and grow conceptual emotional layers – jealousy, declaration, indecision – before being adopted or discarded.
“That’s why I like participating, I enjoy making music from nothing,” JAEHYUN says over a video call from Seoul. But, he adds, at least one – the breezy, carefree “Dandelion” – had a clear, unwavering beginning: a stream of thoughts catalogued in his memo app and “photos in my phone of dandelions where they’re growing between cement in a random place. I looked to those [often].”
“Dandelion” became a pre-release track alongside the darkly serpentine “Roses”, which was penned over a year ago, a song he’s thrilled has finally seen the light of day. “After I finished the album I was like, ‘Am I that into flowers?’” he jokes. “But that was the start. ‘Dandelion’ could be the moment where you’re really pure in soul, that happy vibe when you’re young, and ‘Roses’ is the moment where you miss something so hard. It’s interesting that both songs have such a different story but the feeling where they could be related.” The songs were then partnered in a single music video divided by colour (light versus dark), mood (joy versus pain) and environment (from surrounded by people and nature to an empty house).
This back-and-forth process, the shifting from one style to another, is very JAEHYUN-coded. He himself is a man in constant motion, switching between how he’s seen most often by the wider public: from the cool, calm minimalist, sharp in Prada (for whom he’s a global ambassador), to a member of the chiselled and ultra-famous friendship group known as the ‘97 line’, which includes BTS’s Jungkook and Seventeen’s Mingyu, to the dry-humoured and unpretentious everyman which his longtime fans hold dear.
Taylor Glasby 