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 Rishikesh, your way.

Erknam is a Korean American pop singer from Atlanta. He currently lives in Seoul, South Korea, where he's found fame as a K-pop star.

He was named 2016 Man of the Year by GQ Korea and Forbes named him one of their 30 under 30 for Asia.

But Erk's success in Korea has been complicated a little bit by what he wants to do with his career, versus what he's felt he was allowed to do.

As his career as an artist is involved, he's gotten closer and closer to making the music he wants to make.

In November 2019, Erk released before we begin, his first album, entirely in English.

In this episode, Erknam and producer Rabbit break down a song from that album called Love Da Young.

If I'm gonna love someone, then let it be you.

My name is Erknam. I've been in Korea for about eight years now.

And it's kind of like an accident that happened and I ended up becoming a K-pop singer.

And I think it took everybody by surprise because originally I was supposed to be a strategy consultant at Delui.

And life happens and I ended up on a TV show similar to X-Factor in Korea, got to the top five, signed a record deal, quit my job, and then I started putting out albums.

My stuff is very pop, Western influence and Western driven.

And in Korea, there weren't a lot of acts that were really pushing that sound.

Since the onset of my career, I walk into the label and they're like, what do you want to do?

I want to do Bruno Mars, Maroon 5, right in the center of the road, top 40 pop, and they literally looked at me like, what is that?

Who is that? They were baffled because they're like, nobody's doing that. Why would we do that?

They're like, you're gonna just do Korean Korean music.

And being so hungry to be a part of the industry and wanting to put out an album, I think I made compromises early.

So I could say, we'll try the Korean way.

Do what you want.

The American system is like, we see your color, we see your talent, and we want you to be you.

...