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 Herway.

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 XCX, and Robin. Yeji won the International Breakthrough Award at the AM 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 Past 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.

The physical weight of her much kindness.

My name is Yeji.

I was in London, winter of 2021, and I was kicking it with my friend Matt. And we were revisiting Kid Cuddy's catalog for some reason.

And in the track Kid Cuddy 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,

And it 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 walled orf 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.

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