This Is Your Song
I've thought this for a while now, but you really, truly have no damn way with words….
Today was Thursday.
By now it might as well have been a standing engagement: Seoul business-trip day.
The owner of a closet license — written test on the third try, skills test on the third try, road test on the third try — would, on any ordinary day, have taken public transit without a second thought. Today, though, the situation was a little different. Not that I was driving myself to Seoul. Please. Did I look like someone who wanted to cause an accident on the way?
"Good morning."
She had come all the way from Seoul to the front of my house, just to pick me up.
"Hello."
My manager, that is.
Of course, her actual job wasn't road manager so much as schedule manager and broker, which meant she had no real reason to haul a car out here and fetch me. That was why, every other time I'd gone up to Seoul, I'd simply taken public transit. So why, all of a sudden, had she driven out to collect me?
"There are merch samples in the box beside you. Look them over, and if anything doesn't sit right, jot it down in the notebook and tell me."
To turn the travel time into meeting time.
…Honestly, the first time I heard it, I didn't trust my own ears. Did we really have to go this far just to carve out a meeting?
But there was no helping it. Today's schedule was recording, and nobody knew how long the recording would take. Not me. Not my manager. We couldn't know. The person directing this session was Loe herself. How, exactly, would Loe direct another human being? Would she lower the bar out of consideration for a mere civilian, or would she slam down the merciless hurdles of a genius? The length of the session hinged on the answer. If we were unlucky, it could drag on into the dead of night, the way it had last time.
Which meant that sitting down for a meeting with my manager after the recording was, realistically, a fantasy. The meeting needed to happen before we recorded.
…It would have, if the schedule hadn't snarled.
A sudden, important business trip had dropped on us out of nowhere, and meeting before the session became impossible. From the moment the calendar knotted, my manager and I had put our heads together, scrambling for a way through.
Push the meeting to next week? Then the merch launch slips too. The schedule we'd built so carefully falls apart. Rejected.
Take Friday off as well as Thursday's regular stream holiday, the day the recording was booked, and hold the meeting then? Viewer sentiment would riot. And letting the talent take the hit because of the MCN's circumstances wasn't right. Shelved, for now.
Just settle for an online meeting? Still, shouldn't we see the actual goods? The advantage of looking at the real thing with our own eyes wasn't something we could shrug off. Shelved.
Idea after idea had come flying out, and then—
"Mmm… yeah, I really think the T-shirt should say ordinary member of Medongbu—"
"We still have to gauge demand, so the first merch run ought to stay as safe as possible—"
"Oh, and yesterday's ad got a great response—"
"Really?! It looks plain if you only glance at it, but I actually built that ad out of staging I fussed over like crazy. Especially the bit in the middle where I swap the pads — that's a straight homage to a famous anime, so I even practiced it a few times before the stream, you know? Did the sponsor say they liked that part? Or was it the one where I go, 'The pad is resonating…!' and trigger the pad's hidden function? Or the one where I suppress the new pad's rampage—"
…In the end, the idea that won was holding the meeting in the car.
Was this just how the entertainment industry worked?
Of course, the odd one out was Ryu Chae-in, the workaholic who had joined AY Entertainment and still come within a breath of handing in her resignation for the sole reason that the work wasn't fun. But there was no way Lee Hari could have known a private detail like that.
…Yeah. Turning that offer down back then was the right call.
Contrary to the plans of Kim Mina, Loe's manager — who was ready to debut her the instant she showed the slightest interest in the industry — Hari's favorability toward show business did nothing today but plunge, straight down.
The face-to-face meeting, which had thriftily spent even the time on the road, came to an end. Which meant the car carrying me had arrived in Seoul.
"I have to head straight out on the business trip…. If I can make the time, I'll try to stop by the recording."
"Ah, okay. Get there safe."
…Now that was a real working adult. No wonder people said office workers each carried a resignation letter somewhere in their chest.
Thinking that, I stepped into the recording studio.
"…You're here."
And there to meet me was the masked weirdo I knew so well by now — no, my teacher — and Henchman No. 1 attending her… no. My teacher's manager.
"Hello. I'm in your care today."
"…Did you practice hard?"
"Ah, yes. As much as I could."
"Then let's start with a full check."
…I wasn't even mentally ready, and we were already starting?!
Once Loe had taken in the whole of what my practice had produced, she sank into thought and said nothing at all, only tapping, tap tap, at the mouth of her mask.
"Is there something I should fix?"
When I asked, Loe opened and closed her hand.
"You sang it well…. But…."
Hesitation sat in her voice. How much time passed like that? At last my teacher forced out a single sentence, with difficulty.
"Sorry?"
"…Sorry. It's hard to put into words."
In the end, Loe offered nothing more until the recording began.
Teacher….
I've thought this for a while now, but you really, truly have no damn way with words….
Up to now, I had thought of recording as the music world's version of rerolling. Sing the song dozens of times, hundreds of times, and pick the one that came out best. That wasn't it.
You recorded it line by line, pulled the single best take of each phrase, and stitched those together into a finished piece. That was recording. So it was more accurate to call it not a reroll, but the work of building the strongest chimera.
Anyway, the work of building the strongest chimera proceeded with surprising ease. Loe, whom I had expected to be brutally exacting, barely laid a hand on the session at all. Smooth. Nothing like what I'd worried about. At this rate, it felt as if we'd be done in no time.
But the unease settled in one corner of my chest showed no sign of lifting.
…This is your song. What had Loe meant by that?
That I was too bound up in the sample she'd sung? That my version, right now, was nothing more than a copy of the sample? That a song had no better or worse, only difference, so I didn't need to think about surpassing the sample at all? Or was it that thing they never shut up about, the thing they called important until you were sick of hearing it — emotional expression — and I was lacking it?
I'd tried, in my own way. I'd pictured the scenes in the lyrics as hard as I could, gone digging online for how to put feeling into a song, all of that, and still?
Do I just sing it however I want? But don't I also need to grasp what the composer intended? Even on a test, you have to read the examiner's intent if you want a good score. Except this isn't a test, it's art. Two people can read the same novel and come away with completely different feelings. Isn't interpreting a song the same thing? Was Loe's remark even the right answer in the first place? Genius or not, she can't be correct every single time she opens her mouth. And if she was going to explain, she should have explained properly instead of mumbling something vague — no, more than that, what even is a song in the first place—
…Yeah. What even is a song?
A song is—
"Wait! C-c-can we record this again from the top?!!"
"Wait! C-c-can we record this again from the top?!!"
That was what Hari blurted out in a rush. By then, the recording was roughly eighty percent finished. Out of a situation like that, with no warning at all, came a request to start over from the beginning.
And that absurd request was granted far too easily. On top of the will of the person actually singing, Loe — the one serving as director of this session — accepted it without a moment's reluctance. Who, exactly, was going to stop that? Certainly not the engineer, whose entire claim to the room was having matched Loe's pace a handful of times. And certainly not Loe's manager, who had been quietly watching the session unfold.
So the recording began again from the top. And the person doing the singing repeated the first phrase. Again and again she asked for another retry. It reached a point where it felt like too much.
But not one of them could bring themselves to stop Hari. No — they felt they must not stop her.
…The song was changing. The song was becoming something else. Like someone choosing clothes that fit? Like someone making the clothes their own? Or was it even possible, in the first place, to catch that sight in language?
What were they supposed to call it?
In that moment, someone murmured without meaning to.
"…Individuality?"
Yes. Individuality.
There was no other word that would do. Right now, Hari was melting an individuality that belonged only to her into the song. But did individuality appear out of nowhere like that? Wasn't it something you were born with? Had she been struck by some sudden enlightenment? This wasn't a comic — was a thing like that even possible? Then again, people said reality was more comic-like than comics, so maybe she had to allow it.
While the others floundered in that confusion, Hari kept singing the song over and over. And at a certain moment—
"That's it!!!"
It was complete.