Song Exploder - Yaeji - Passed Me By

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

Yaeji is a singer, songwriter, and producer from New York. During her childhood she moved between Queens, Atlanta, and Seoul. While she was at college in the States, she started DJing and releasing her own music. That led to two EPs in 2017, and since then, she’s also done remixes for Dua Lipa, Charli XCX, and Robyn. Yaeji won the International Breakthrough Award at the AIM Awards in 2020. This week she’s releasing her debut album, With A Hammer. For this episode, I talked to Yaeji about her song “Passed Me By.” She sings the song in Korean and English, and she told me how using both languages gives her a broader palette to express her ideas. For more, visit songexploder.net/yaeji.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. Yeji is a singer, songwriter, and producer from New York. When she was a kid, she moved between Queens, Atlanta, and Seoul, Korea. When she was in college, she started DJing and releasing her own music. That led to two EPs in 2017, and since then, she's also done remixes for Duolipa, Charlie XX, and Robin. Yeiji won the International Breakthrough Award at the AIM Awards in 2020, and this week she's releasing her debut album with a hammer.

For this episode, I talked to Yeji about her song, Pass Me By. She sings in Korean and in English, and she told me how using both languages gives her a broader palette to express her ideas. He's Yeji. I was in London, winter of 2021, and I was kicking it with my friend Matt, and we were revisiting Kid Kuddy's catalog for some reason. And in the track Kid Kuddy made with MGMT Pursuit of Happiness,

there's a synth that recurs throughout the whole track that I can't sing it. Well, I think it kind of goes like, boom, boom, boom, and it like repeats over and over. and that synth alone does so much, in my opinion, and says so much. I remember that being the spark for the first synth element. So that's the first piece of sound I laid down in June of 2022. So actually quite a lot of time had passed, but I don't know why. I still feel like there was a through line.

I was born in Queens, New York, and I was raised in America for a bit before moving to Korea for the first time. So I have memories of both, but from different time periods. I had done a lot of traveling back and forth to Korea and New York writing this album. And June was a time when I wrote a lot of music in Brooklyn, which I was finding difficult for a few years. but I had just gotten a new synth at the time, a Waldorf synth called Quantum. It's really, really powerful and came with hundreds and hundreds of presets. And so I'm just flipping through presets, kind of jumping to random ones.

And playing where my fingers go. And then from there, I keep layering and keep improvising. I'm not classically trained. I never fully got to study music theory. I picked up some instruments growing up piano and flute, but I truly forgot how to play any of those instruments. And so my relationship with music when I started making it, which was an early adulthood, had been very ignorant in this freeing way where I just trust my feeling and my ear. When I'm coming up with the vocals and lyrics, it is a lot of trial and error, just like how I write synths and drums and everything else. And then I have an idea of what kind of flow I want to be delivering with my voice. So then in my little notebook, I'll underline a bunch of syllables that I want, kind of like hangman. and I'm trying to fill in that many syllables. So it's almost like this instrumental,

percussive approach to using my voice, but then it's also a limiting thing and a prompt. And that's usually how I write lyrics. The day has been a little weak, a little strong, I light a little fire. Anything that touches me will evaporate. and fly higher and higher. The first line I wrote was,

Today is a little weak, a little strong, I light a little fire. Anything that touches me will evaporate and go higher and higher. That day, when I started writing the lyrics, I felt a bit of anger. It wasn't the typical type of anger of, I'm gonna punch something. It was more like,

a slow, churning, brewing type of feeling. It started from anger because during lockdown, we were cut off from distractions and had to face ourselves. So a lot of past memories surfaced and from there I felt anger for my younger self and all the things I've experienced and suppressed up until now. I had a deep period of confusion to then gaining the energy again to realize in order to love myself, I have to treat myself like another person because that's always come more easily than just slowing myself straight up. So I realized a form of loving myself is looking straight in the eyes of younger me, who went through things I did not want to remember and therefore I had forgotten about until this moment. The drumbeat itself is one of my favorite things about this song.

The snare is like really cathartic and satisfying, almost like when you're like opening a Coke bottle or, you know, that feeling of that's really hitting. This sample was in there throughout all the demo stages and then I remember thinking and discussing, should we have a drummer friend recreate this? But then ultimately I decided against it because there are so many things about this specific sample that's weird that makes it the one for this song. When I was writing this album, I was in general finding a lot of old music to listen to and watch because over the pandemic it was just hard to and take new material. I was seeking comfort and nostalgia only. I was listening to Korean hip-hop from the 90s. I actually loved just hearing those two things together. That straight-up sounded like 90s hip-hop.

The reason I sing in English and Korean has changed for me throughout the years, Korean was the first language I chose to sing in because it felt private to me. I had a lot of friends who couldn't speak it. and it would make me less shy about the subject matters I was singing about, and it made me feel free. I learned as I wrote more songs, I love how Korean sounds phonetically and sonically

texturally, so it became an instrument. And now singing in two languages gives me a broader way of expression with words than, you know, singing in one language. But also I feel like a slightly different person depending on which language I speak. So it helped convey this duality, like at the end of the introverse, I say, That sentence is a real blend of conglish, which I rarely do and it felt nice to do that. The last line there is, I'm un-unung-yok-he. And it just means I'm powerless, but the way it hits in Korean is so different. Same with the line before that.

I'm just talking about the weather changing and mood swings. And I don't think it would have hit the same way I wanted it to get across if I had said that in English. And it's also tied to specific memories I have of while I was in Korea and feeling that way. I do wonder if the need for Korean in some songs come from me wanting to stay in touch with my Korean side while I'm in the States. flipping through and touching the diary I had completed from the previous year, I journal in Korean and the weight of the pages from those diaries that had been filled up with so many thoughts, so many feelings, and just documentation of what I ate, who I was with, what we did.

When I hold it the next year, it feels really wild and it feels really physical. and heavy. But in that voice note, I can hear a lot of things that actually ended up differently in the final version, like singing Pass Me By didn't feel right. Pass Me By, Pass Me By, Pass Me By, Pass Me By, Pass Me By. Singing it almost gave it too much of a personality or almost guided it too much to be a certain feeling and what had passed me by was the old memories I hadn't acknowledged and all the past me's that I hadn't acknowledged and I was like how do I get that across and so I just kept repeating pass me by pass me by pass me by pass me by pass me almost like a tongue twister but I pitch down my vocals and that's how I got the sound

I like all the weirdness that comes from semitones rubbing up against, you know, other synths and melodies I have. I like flipping the pages and feeling the physical weight of how much time has. The last thing that came was the last chorus. I repeat the same rhythm and melody, but the lyrics change. So in the first chorus, the English says, How It passed me by one by one. How it passed me by one by one. Maud Able Ponaughtasso is I almost didn't recognize it.

But in Korean, so much of communicating is by reading each other, reading the room, and so the pronoun doesn't have to be specified at times. So it's very unclear what I'm referencing or who I'm referencing. And then in the final chorus, I say, how she came to me. So the Korean part in there is I almost didn't recognize her. It's actually the same lyrics. But in the English, the pronoun conveys that it is she who I almost couldn't recognize. So the English changes, but the Korean is the same, but the Korean changes its meaning because of the context of the English. Exactly.

Younger me, past me, had been there the whole time looking at me, but I had always avoided her existence until now. This song feels and looks like the moment when I lock eyes with Past Me and we finally acknowledge each other, that's what Pass Me By is about. Though I had set an intention of it being how anger passes through me, I mean, that prompt doesn't have an answer of this is how anger passed through me. It was a question to begin with, but I had no idea where the track would head. or how it would end or what it would mean. The first day I started the track, I was pissed, and then the last day I'm like crying, thinking about my childhood. And that's what makes it fun for me, too.

It's so real. And now here's Pass Me By by by Yeji in its entirety. Visit SongExploder.net slash Yeji. You'll find links to buy or stream Pass Me By. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Kesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career.

And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. and this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope.

I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co,

or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. This episode was made by me, Craig Ely, Kathleen Smith, and Mary Dolan. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm.

You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rishi Herewe. and you can follow the show at SongExploder. You can also get a SongExploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.