A Song to Win Them Over
Rendezvous, a punk rock song, was the first piece I’d ever composed for a band.
But I hadn’t made it alone.
After writing a rough draft—more like a canvas than a finished painting—I’d gathered everyone’s opinions and polished it into the final version.
We all loved rock in common, but our tastes diverged in the details.
Hashing out everyone’s ideas hadn’t been easy. We fought a lot, and I couldn’t even count how many revisions we’d gone through.
That didn’t mean the song was some objectively outstanding masterpiece, either.
It had meaning, sure, but there were limits to what we could achieve with the skills we had back then.
But now it was different.
If I’m the one doing it now, couldn’t I make this song truly shine?
To find out, I figured I’d need to approach it objectively.
Relying on my old memories, I started layering session after session, trying to get as close as possible to the original version of Rendezvous.
Recreating it exactly was difficult, but I could get it close enough.
The familiar music, heard again after so long, tugged a smile out of me before I could stop it.
It reeked of amateurism, but it carried memories inside it.
There were some embarrassing memories in there, too.
We’d made Rendezvous punk rock because, back then, we wanted to stand against commercial mainstream music.
Pop and idol songs were all the rage, and hip-hop had swept across Korea in a tidal wave, but we thought it was cool to stubbornly cling to rock anyway.
We thought idols were pretty dolls who just sang whatever songs their agencies handed them, without thinking, and we thought hip-hop was music for people who couldn’t sing on key.
Of course, now I knew exactly how embarrassing those thoughts were.
Music was ultimately something someone had to listen to.
Considering the listener’s taste was only natural. It was noble, even.
So yes, we had been wrong back then.
That was why I wanted to use this song to convince the others.
Because a good song had power.
With that in mind, I dove into the arrangement work using the original track as my base.
I started transforming Rendezvous, once packed with amateurishness and narrow-minded bias, into something people would actually want to hear.
I lowered the tempo to medium, and replaced the excessive variations with rhythms that belonged to a more cohesive structure.
At the same time, I cut back the overall presence of the lead guitar, arranging it so it would stand out only in specific sections.
If the melody guitar ran wild for too long, the song became difficult and lost its chance at accessibility.
But I left the chorus mostly alone.
I wasn’t trying to make it pure pop.
I even considered changing the guitar tone, but that felt like it would shake the song’s identity, so I left it as it was.
When I looked at the finished result, the punk rock song had turned into a medium-tempo pop rock track, or maybe pop-punk.
“Hmm⋯⋯.”
Eighty points? Maybe eighty-five, if I was giving it nostalgia points?
Either way, I liked it a lot.
Jo Hyeonseop, the owner of ST Studio, only ran the studio now, but once upon a time, he’d been a hugely famous producer.
That was before the genre even had the name K-pop—back when he’d tried his hand at idol groups after drawing inspiration from Japan.
But that was ancient history. It had already been more than fifteen years since he’d done nothing but run ST Studio.
He’d gotten a call from Jang Deokcheol at Hyeon-ui Ullim just the day before.
Apparently, a high school student named Cha Seoha—who played like a monster—was coming in to record the next day, and Deokcheol had practically been bursting with excitement.
“He says he’s recording an original song, so take a look at what he can do. According to him, he’s better at composing than playing guitar, but from where I’m standing, I can’t imagine him being better at anything than guitar.”
Part of him was curious, and part of him was skeptical.
If Deokcheol had taken a shine to him, he had to have the basics down—but was he really as incredible as the man made him sound?
A high schooler?
And not only could he play, but he was supposedly good at composing too?
That was why he’d come to the studio, timing his visit to match Cha Seoha’s session.
“Has Cha Seoha arrived?”
At Jo Hyeonseop’s question, the part-timer, Park Minji, answered, “Yes.”
“What’s he like?”
“Handsome and tall. Kind of like an idol.”
“An idol?”
“No, not exactly. Maybe a trainee? His signature was ridiculously elegant.”
“Really?”
Jo Hyeonseop tilted his head.
So what Deokcheol had meant was that the kid had striking looks and could play pretty well?
“Move aside.”
Jo Hyeonseop sat down at the spot where he could monitor the studio.
The boy sitting there in a neat school uniform was tall and striking even while seated.
His face was still a little rough around the edges, with some softness of youth lingering in his cheeks, but he looked like the kind of face that would only gather a thicker fanbase as he grew older.
Then Cha Seoha on the screen began playing the song he’d just recorded.
The moment Jo Hyeonseop heard it, he was surprised.
A hard-edged melody unlike the image of the student started pouring out.
Rock, then?
And hard rock at that?
It felt like an homage to 1980s punk rock made by an amateur, but it also carried a certain nostalgia, and that alone made it not bad at all.
He’d just started thinking he wanted to hear more when the boy stopped the music.
Park Minji, who’d been watching beside him, jumped in.
“What do you think, sir? I thought it was pretty good even from the session-building stage.”
“It’s decent. For an amateur.”
“Sir, are you downplaying him just because he’s good-looking?”
“What nonsense are you talking about?”
“An artist who looks like that and plays like that? That’s so cute—no, I mean, so precious!”
At Minji’s idol-fan-style outburst, Jo Hyeonseop gave a little shrug.
Yes, that was the textbook reaction.
Deokcheol had probably been the same.
Just as Jo Hyeonseop was about to stop paying attention to the high schooler named Cha Seoha, a new song started playing.
It wasn’t entirely new.
It sounded like an arranged version of the song he’d heard earlier.
But the level was different.
The medium-tempo track was the kind of song that improved your mood just by listening to it.
If nothing got in the way while you listened, that meant the instruments were blending together harmoniously.
The music, which began with a brisk, refreshing verse, moved forward while maintaining a steady sense of tension.
By the time it reached the pre-chorus, something began to build.
The tension, previously at a comfortable level, filled up to the brim, and the drums kicked in as the instruments broke into a run.
Then, the moment it hit the chorus, all that tension released at once and a funky rhythm, nearly identical to the original, burst forward.
“Oh?”
Only when the chorus began did he realize it.
That high school kid had built the buildup for the chorus beautifully through the pre-chorus.
Amateur composers usually tended to pour all their strength into the chorus, but this kid understood something important.
If you wanted to leave a strong impression, the steps leading up to it mattered, and he had handled them superbly.
Thanks to that, the emotional delivery was also spot-on.
A feeling of youth that was a little excited, a little awkward.
He could almost see it: young people in school uniforms running under a blue sky.
Jo Hyeonseop was taken aback.
This was professional-level work.
No, not just professional—work at the level of producers who were hot in the scene right now.
Could a teenager really do that?
And if so, then what had that first song been?
Wait. Could this be something he was hired to arrange?
But contrary to Jo Hyeonseop’s impression, Cha Seoha on the monitor tilted his head, looking dissatisfied with something.
Then he started tweaking the song for another twenty minutes or so.
Jo Hyeonseop, watching, wasn’t bored in the slightest.
I’m curious.
What else is he trying to do here?
But absurdly enough, he couldn’t actually hear the song in full.
The student on the monitor had only finished listening through his monitoring headset and then exported the file onto a USB drive.
If it wasn’t played through the speakers, the counter-side monitor setup couldn’t hear it.
And then Cha Seoha started making yet another song.
For a guitar-driven track, you could tell everything from the riff alone.
This riff was going to sell.
And not just sell—it was highly likely to sell extremely well.
But that new song seemed to be in a woman’s key. Was that also part of a commission?
What in the world is this kid?
He was the kind of talent you wanted to sign on the spot.
His looks were outstanding, too, so if he went into idol activities, he’d probably rake in money hand over fist.
“Do you think he has an agency?”
“Of course he does. You think stuff like that just comes from regular training?”
“Hey, that’s not something training can produce.”
It was talent. Innate talent.
Even so, he felt like there had to be some company behind him.
There were far too many people in the world with an eye for recognizing raw gems.
How much time had passed after that?
At last, the studio door opened, and the student they’d been watching on the monitor appeared in person.
He was even more handsome than he’d looked on screen, and he carried a presence that was strangely rare in a student.
He had a very real, very physical kind of charisma.
“Excuse me, where’s the restroom?”
And his voice was even better.
“It’s around that corner over there⋯. Student.”
“Yes?”
“I was listening in by accident while monitoring, but are those your original songs?”
At Jo Hyeonseop’s question, the student nodded calmly.
“Yes.”
“Did someone hire you to arrange them? The quality of the two songs is completely different.”
“I just⋯⋯ revised an old song my friends and I made a while back.”
“A while back?”
He was this young now, so when he said a while back, how far back did he mean?
“Do you have a company? You do, right?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Huh. So you’ve been doing all this on your own?”
“Yes.”
“No, I’ve been listening to your songs too closely, but if you’re open to it, I’d love to introduce you to some good companies.”
At that, the student stared at him in silence.
Only then did Jo Hyeonseop realize he might have come across as suspicious, and he hurriedly handed over a business card.
“I’m the owner here. I’m really making you this offer out of nothing but goodwill.”
“You know, right? This is a song this guy made. He also produced the group that sang it.”
Minji, standing nearby, added in her two cents.
“I appreciate the offer, but I’m sorry.”
“I just hate seeing talent go to waste. You don’t have to sign anything, but I’d at least like you to go talk to them.”
“I’m not on my own.”
“What do you mean, not on your own?”
“I’m preparing to start a band with my friends.”
“Ah.”
At the word band, Jo Hyeonseop let out a low exhale of admiration.
He’d thought the genre had only been rock-based, but he hadn’t expected him to actually want to start a rock band.
“If you need anything, make sure you call me.”
“Why?”
“Because I used to be in a band myself once. And Deokcheol had nothing but praise for you.”
“Ah. Um⋯⋯. Thank you.”
The student took the business card, but he didn’t seem all that interested in it.
“Can I ask how you plan to handle band activities?”
He knew it was a bit of an intrusion, but the band market was in a serious slump right now.
What Jo Hyeonseop was worried about was this: that someone this talented would learn how bad the market really was and get crushed by it.
The student’s answer was simple.
“We haven’t gathered all the members yet. But thank you for the kindness.”
...
For some reason in this life, it felt like middle-aged men kept flocking to me.
I knew there were a lot of people from that generation who still carried nostalgia for rock, but it felt like a Pokémon game or something.
Maybe like the gym leaders you meet when you enter a new gym?
And the question those two had thrown at me was the same.
What, exactly, did I want to do in this stagnant band market?