Hye Jin Lee

Hello, hello.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, it's a bold move to use Arirang as a framework for the entire album because it comes with a lot of expectations that it will have to be very, very Korean.

But in this first track, Body to Body, we do hear Arirang, you know, getting incorporated towards the end.

But it's not just Arirang.

It's actually a very specific Arirang, which is Gyeonggi Arirang.

Arirang actually has like very many variations by districts, right?

in regions.

This one is called Gyeonggi Arirang and it's one of the most well-known Arirangs in Korea.

But there are, I think there are about like 30,000 different versions of Arirang.

This one became like the representative of Arirang because of a movie that came out in 1926 by Na Eun-gyu called Arirang.

And in that movie, the song or this version was featured and that's how Koreans kind of accepted this as the representative Arirang.

But there's one part in the lyrics that kind of like got me going, huh, that's interesting.

Like there's a lyric that says, And I thought the use of the term was really interesting because it's a pure Korean word for nation or ethnic tribe.

So you would translate into like a group of people saying,

of the same blood, who share same language, culture, and history for a long period of time.

And that's, you know, the moment where we get a sense of what this song is about or how it's kind of like talking about the group leaning into their Korean Bruce-en identities.

But I don't think that's really the core message of this song, even though we do hear Arirang towards the end.

The part that I thought was really interesting was actually in the pre-chorus, the vocal line singing, which is...

So that translates into hand in hand.