Immersion (2)
After finishing the recording, I hung the headphones on the stand and stepped out of the soundproof booth. Seo Geonwoo turned his head toward me.
"Good work."
"......Yes. Thank you for your hard work as well."
Beyond those words, he offered no real evaluation. Not even the usual comments—good, bad, this part was lacking.
I tilted my head slightly and returned to the sofa where I'd been sitting before.
Was it not good enough?
All kinds of stray thoughts started chaining together in my mind. I had thought I'd drawn up my own experience and emotion and poured myself into the song as fully as I could. Had that still not been enough? Or had the guide track been written from the start for a male vocal, so that my female voice tone simply failed to fit the song's bones?
As the branches of thought stretched on without end, ready to start eating away at me—
Tap, tap.
I lifted both hands and lightly slapped my cheeks twice.
Get a grip. You did your best. That's enough.
I decided to reframe the whole thing. Of course winning this survival audition would be wonderful, but the championship title itself wasn't my only reason for competing. I simply wanted to prove the true skill of the singer Han Jiyoung to the world, and to repay the public who had answered my voice with a stage full of sincerity.
If I get cut here somehow, I can just release an album.
On the hard drive of my studio computer, songs I'd composed with the experience of my past life were piled up like a mountain. Even if I failed the audition, I had a solid fallback I could put out into the world whenever I wanted.
Once I steadied my heart that way, my breathing eased considerably.
Kang Minhyuk, who went into the booth after me, loosened his throat this way and that, then sent an OK sign toward Seo Geonwoo beyond the glass just as I had earlier.
Click—.
When Seo Geonwoo clicked the mouse, the piano accompaniment filled the recording studio once more. Matching it, Kang Minhyuk began to sing the first verse.
Seo Geonwoo sat with his arms crossed, focusing entirely on the performance without a word. I held my breath as well and listened intently to Kang Minhyuk's voice flowing from the speakers.
......Amazing.
The admiration came on its own. Was it the difference in gender, or the technique he'd polished over long years on musical theater stages? Track 17 as he sang it had a completely different texture from when I had sung it. Even as a raw voice with no mixing or correction applied, there was an overwhelming density that seemed to pack the entire space full of sound.
Eventually the song ended, and Kang Minhyuk came out of the booth wiping sweat as he pulled off his headphones. When he sat down beside me, Seo Geonwoo, who had been propping his chin the whole time, finally rose and spoke.
"Both of you—do you really want to do this song?"
Kang Minhyuk and I glanced at each other at the same moment, neither of us going first. We soon dropped our gazes and nodded toward Seo Geonwoo in unison.
Confirming our resolve, Seo Geonwoo let out a short sigh.
"Understood. Leave your emails and head out. I'll send you the track."
To the very end, he offered no critique of either of our performances. No word on who had been better, no advice on which direction to practice in.
After finishing the recording and stepping out of the GW Entertainment building, Kang Minhyuk and I stopped side by side in the cold wind. We stood there blankly for a long while without speaking. It wasn't so much an invisible battle of wills as it was gauging each other under the weight of what we'd just been through, unsure what to say.
Unable to endure the awkward silence, I spoke first.
"Thank you for your hard work. I'll be heading out first."
I gave a light nod and was about to turn and take a step when—
"Excuse me, Jiyoung!"
Kang Minhyuk urgently called me to a stop. When I turned my head to look, he continued hesitantly.
"If you have time...... would you like to go on a date with me?"
"......"
My brow furrowed instantly. I stared at him with a frown.
"A date?"
Seeing my sharp reaction to the absurd word choice that had suddenly popped out, Kang Minhyuk flinched and waved both hands.
"No, you don't have to look at it like that......!"
What? What was my face doing?
I grumbled inwardly and loosened my facial muscles a little.
"I misspoke for a second. Not so much a date as...... I have a lot of musical questions I'd like to ask you, Jiyoung."
Only then did my furrowed brow settle back into place. Truthfully, I also had more than one or two things I'd been curious about while listening to his singing earlier.
"Where did you have in mind?"
When I asked in a softened voice, Kang Minhyuk finally sighed in relief and smiled faintly.
"There's a small theater nearby where I first started musicals. It should be empty around this time...... shall we talk there for a bit?"
I thought we'd go to a cafe or something. A theater, huh.
I didn't catch any shady vibes. If anything, a place where we could talk purely about music without worrying about cameras or other people's eyes wasn't a bad choice.
"Sure. Let's go."
When I nodded, Kang Minhyuk took the lead and walked.
Following behind Kang Minhyuk, we arrived at a shabby little theater tucked into an alley a little off the busy streets, one that still carried the full weight of the years.
Creak—.
Kang Minhyuk groped familiarly along the wall and flipped a switch, and a yellowish incandescent light came on in the dim dressing room. Faded musical posters were plastered messily across the walls. Most seemed to be small-scale original musicals, and photos of a younger Kang Minhyuk appeared here and there.
Kang Minhyuk looked at the posters for a moment with a distant gaze as if lost in old memories, then turned to me and smiled softly.
"What do you think? Small, but romantic, right?"
"Yeah, I guess so. So what did you want to say?"
Kang Minhyuk cleared his throat once, then pulled over an old chair from the dressing room and sat facing me.
"Earlier, listening to you sing from outside the booth...... honestly, I was a bit shocked."
Kang Minhyuk began listing out one after another the impressions he'd felt in the recording studio earlier. Surprisingly, the assessments coming from his mouth were eerily similar to what I had been thinking inwardly while listening to his singing from outside the booth. We had each precisely seen through the other's vocal characteristics and strengths.
"So I wanted to ask."
Kang Minhyuk leaned his upper body slightly forward and looked straight into my eyes.
"You only heard the guide track once, right? So I was curious how you could immerse yourself so perfectly in the song in an instant. No matter how well you sing, locking in the emotional line that quickly is really hard, isn't it?"
At his question, I propped my chin and sank deep into thought. How had I been able to catch the emotional line so immediately? After a brief silence, I threw a question back at him instead.
"Then how did you catch the emotional line, Minhyuk? Looking at you earlier, the moment you stepped into the booth you were singing like someone who'd just broken up."
At my reverse question, Kang Minhyuk nodded as if it were obvious and answered.
"I've lived as an actor on stage for years. Memorizing countless scripts, performing the lives of various characters, I've absorbed all kinds of situations and emotions into my body. So when I'm given a melody or lyrics, I can immediately open the most appropriate drawer of emotion from my acting database and pull it out."
Of course. An answer worthy of a musical actor. Listening to him, I looked into my own inner self once more. I had never learned acting, nor lived someone else's life on stage in their place. But I too had a database of my own.
"I'm probably similar to you, Minhyuk."
Kang Minhyuk blinked as if he didn't understand.
"Similar? Did you learn acting too, Jiyoung?"
As if realizing something, he clapped his hands and made a fuss.
"Aha! So that's why you had that alluring gaze during the Round 2 stage of Invitation......!"
My face instantly burned hot. I hurriedly waved my hands.
"No, that's not it."
That was just a dark history.
Swallowing the words I almost added inwardly, I answered in a much calmer voice.
"Not acting...... maybe it's because of my overwhelming volume of musical input."
"Musical input?"
"Yes. From a very young age, I listened to music like crazy, analyzed it, and imagined."
There was no need to bring up my past life.
"Dissecting countless songs regardless of genre—what emotion explodes in this chord progression, how you have to release your breath on this rhythm for it to land...... thousands, tens of thousands of musical narratives are stacked up in my head."
I made a gesture of pressing piano keys with my fingers in the air as I continued.
"So when I first heard the piano accompaniment for track 17, I didn't need to act at all."
Listening quietly to my explanation, Kang Minhyuk gently stroked his chin and spoke with interest.
"Didn't need to act at all, huh...... That sounds like something only the gods of acting would say."
"Gods of acting?"
"Yes. People say things like that, right? 'That actor really seems like someone who lived as that role. As if they were possessed by the character.' What you showed in the booth earlier was exactly that."
At his grandiose comparison, I tilted my head slightly and thought to myself.
Hmm, is that how it is?
I had just naturally pulled out the data stacked inside me to match the mood when the accompaniment started playing. To a third party, it must have looked like possessed acting or perfect possession.
Come to think of it, I remembered Kim Taesung saying something similar to me five years ago.
Jiyoung, your immersion in songs is really something. But...... have you thought about doing something a little more mainstream? A bright dance track, like the pop-rock that used to be popular.
These days, after being gaslit by Naeun and Sia into even dancing in a cheongsam, my negative view of dancing had completely vanished—but back then it was different. It was a time when I still had a pretentious artist complex about competing with nothing but my voice, so I had absolutely no intention of dancing on stage. Moreover, when I saw the concept costume design Kim Taesung had ambitiously pushed at the time, what little remaining motivation I had crashed through the floor into the basement.
Cat ears...... and cat paw gloves, I think?
Just recalling it sent shivers of embarrassment down my spine. Even for an idol agency, trying to put such a cute, cringeworthy concept on a kid who wanted to do music... That bizarre costume design had played quite a large role in my flatly rejecting the proposal and eventually being dropped.
A sudden curiosity rose.
Come to think of it, did Kim Taesung never end up releasing that song?
In the five years since leaving Luminous, I never heard news of that cat-concept pop-rock dance track coming out into the world.
Or maybe when I got cut, he just scrapped the whole thing.
While fitting together pieces of the past in my head, a voice calling me from the seat in front brought me back to reality.
"Jiyoung?"
"Yes?"
"You seem like someone who was born to make art."
"Heh."
A little snort of laughter escaped me without thinking.
That was high praise, wasn't it?