In the entertainment industry, you can work for years, and the progress can be frustratingly incremental. And then, in a moment, everything can explode. That’s been the whirlwind songwriters EJAE and Mark Sonnenblick have experienced since the animated musical “Kpop Demon Hunters” launched on Netflix June 20th. The duo was part of the teams that wrote a number of the charting songs off the soundtrack, but they are the only two credited with the global smash, “Golden.” And if you haven’t heard it, you might have been stuck on a desert island for the past three months.
READ MORE: “KPop Demon Hunters”: Arden Cho Thought She’d Retired, A Netflix Phenomenon Has Changed Everything
The breakout turned out to be the song of the summer (potentially the year) that no one saw coming. At posting, “Golden” has been no. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for eight straight weeks and has pulled in 742 million streams on Spotify alone. Not only is “Golden” a player in the Oscar race for Best Original Song, but Grammy nomination voting for Song of the Year and Record of the Year. It’s also put EJAE, who sings the role of Rumi in the movie, back in the spotlight as a solo artist. Something she told The Playlist she “technically” wasn’t looking for.
“I really kind of made peace with the idea, and it was very intentional that I didn’t want to be an artist, to be honest. I didn’t think it fit my personality,” EJAE admits. “But after this, and with fans giving so much love to my vocals and my songs, I think it kind of gave me a little perspective on certain things on what an artist is for me. And songwriting is always number one, and songwriting is art in itself. So, like, maybe that’s kind of the way I will approach my writing. So yeah, I will be releasing some shingles, and yeah, stay tuned.”
Two days after we spoke, EJAE dropped the news that a new solo single, “In Another World,” will drop on Oct. 24. Perfectly timed to an “SNL” appearance for EJAE and her Huntr/X sisters, where none other than Bad Bunny tacitly endorsed that the songs from “Kpop Demon Hunters” were not just for kids. Again, after years of battling the grind, life comes at you fast.
In our conversation last week, both EJAE and Sonnenblick hinted they would work together again, discussed the specific direction “Hunters” directors Maggie Kang and Chris Applehans were looking for. EJAE revealed her emotional reaction to singing the demo for “Golden,” specifically, and much, much more.
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The Playlist: Congratulations on “Golden”! I know the song came late into the process. It was sort of the last song the directors were waiting for. I know you guys had worked on other songs together for the movie, but how did you guys get paired on this one?
Mark Sonnenblick: So, we had done “Your Idol “and “How It’s Done” with us and Teddy [Park], and I mean, the producers were slightly different song to song, but had worked with the Black Label basically on “How It’s Done” and “Your Idol.” And they’d both gone really well, and we kind of all loved what we had written together. And so I think kind of the initial idea with “Golden” is that they sort of had a clearer sense of what they needed for that moment, it started with, “Hey, let’s do what we did for these other ones and get Mark, EJAE together.”
EJAE: And then the producers, 24, Ido and Teddy, they produce this amazing track, and Ian [Eisendrath] sent it to me, and the moment he sent it, I listened to it in the car on the way to the dentist. And honestly, the track was so good. The inspiration of the melody, actually, the hook melody, came really fast. So, the moment I laid that down on my voice memo, I brought it into the project, my Ableton, and laid out some melodies, including incorporating that hook. And that day, I had a session with Mark again remotely on Zoom, and I was so excited to show him the melodies. I knew he’d love it. And the moment I played him, this is how our process is, I would show him all the melodies I worked on on the track. And I still remember your smile on your face. You’re like, “Oh my God.” And you’re like, “Wow, EJAE, this is great.” And then I remember it was just so exciting to see his reaction [to the] “they’re going to be going to be golden” in the gibberish melody that was made. You heard “Golden” too, but he already had an idea in his mind to do “going to be going to be golden.” So, it was just like we were in sync. It was like a universe kind.
Mark Sonnenblick: It fell right exactly on. But she, yeah…
EJAE: I was literally going like, “It’ll be, it’ll be golden.” I don’t know what I was saying, but it was something like that, and he was like, “Oh my God, EJAE ‘got to be going to be golden,’ right?”
Mark Sonnenblick: Yeah, because where it starts is we’re writing songs for this moment and had just seen a couple other iterations of the song, and EJAE recorded them, and there were some great songs there. But the story, all these songs start with what Maggie and Chris [asked for]: What does the song need to do for the story in this moment? How does it speak to the characters? And with “Golden” specifically, it had to be this idea of, they called it “the false victory song” for a while. This moment of, “Hey, we’re going to seal the whole moon.” That’s where “Golden” comes from. It’s going to be the golden whole moon. But they can’t say that in the song. They’re pop stars, so they’re singing about how it means they’re finally coming into their power. They’re finally becoming the people that they’re meant to be. But there’s this kind of dark undertone, a little bit, which is that Rumi thinks to do that, she’s going to have to…
EJAE: Cover it up, yeah, hide it up, which is ironic because the lyric is, I’m done hiding. So it’s a bittersweet song in the movie.
Mark Sonnenblick: And then you hear it outside of the movie, it’s like a bop, and you’re like, “Yeah, Golden”!
EJAE: But that was the beauty of the song. It was such a great balance of the two. Of it being theater and still relating to the storyline, but also having a strong melody that still stands alone as a pop melody. And that was what was so fun working with Mark, who’s from a theater background, I’m K-pop, to balance each other out with Mark. “That’s a little too wordy. Let’s not go there. That’s not a little musical,” Y’know? Because I’m not in that world. So, for him, it might sound pop to him, but I’m like, “No, Mark, that sounds pretty musical.” And I would do a pop melody or pop lyric, and he’d be like, “That’s a really cool bar, but it doesn’t do anything for the story. It feels empty.” So, it was important for Mark to bring every intentional word, every word that was chosen was intentional, to make sure it’s for the character and for the story to build.
Mark Sonnenblick: Well, that was “gonna be, gonna be,” that’s part of why I was thinking about that. Then it magically fell on what EJAE had written because they’re not there yet. That’s the whole thing. It’s very important in the story that it’s not like, “Hello, we are golden right now It’s that we’re almost there. We’re so close, we’re going to be.” And as silly as that is, every word of basically every song had to go through this filter of “is it locked into what the filmmakers want to do at any given moment with the characters?”
EJAE: And Maggie specifically asked. She wanted high notes. She really wanted a hard melody where she can show off her voice, but also in a way that metaphorically shows she’s really reaching in desperation to reach that whole moon. So, it was challenging to sing it alive, but thank goodness, I also see a lot of myself in the character. Rumi, I used to be a K-pop trainee myself for a long, long time was dropped. And so this whole feeling of perfectionism, which is Rumi’s thing too, she’s such a perfectionist. She’s so hardworking that she ignores, or not just ignores, she tries to hide all her insecurities that she’s ashamed of, which I mean her patterns. And for me, the same thing. It was all about that you have to be perfect when you wanna be a K-pop idol. So I try to bring that into the lyric writing as well. And especially when it comes to the singing Golden, the demo, I told this mark now, but I cried singing the demo. It was such a healing song in itself. So I was going through a hard time at that time, and I felt very hopeless. So writing a song about Hope was a song I didn’t know I needed at that time. But
The Playlist: Would it have crushed you if you sent the demo to Maggie and Chris and they said, “No, that’s not what we were looking for.” Were you that attached to it?
EJAE: Of course!
Mark Sonnenblick: This one? Yeah. Some of the other ones, well, not in a bad way, we like, but this one pretty quickly like…
EJAE: Yeah, it was like we felt it immediately when we were done, Mark and I just looked at each other on Zoom, and we’re like, “Yo, this is a beggar. This is a hit.” And I was so excited that I never did it with the other songs, but with Maggie and Chris when they were in Korea at that time, and I had to go record “Free.” And I remember going to them, I was like, “Maggie, Chris, please stay excited for ‘Golden,’ the Gold song.” They’re like, “O.K.” And we sent it to Ian that night, and I have the screenshot of Ian, our music director, and he was like literally all capitalized, “THIS IS MASSIVE. THIS IS A SMASH.” So yeah, it felt different.
Mark Sonnenblick: Yeah, and just to say it doesn’t mean that there weren’t a lot of rewrites on it. There were still a lot of lyrics that changed. There was still the bridge. We probably did three or four different versions of that because you’re still calibrating it to the movie.
EJAE: Lots of fine-tuning. This was just the first section of the song. But even that lyrically we had to change a lot to make sure it fits the story, make sure it’s really showing the characters and what they’re going through. The bridge took forever.
Mark Sonnenblick: The bridge was like, there were so many, the bridge was long. But yeah, I mean, that’s part of it too, is that the whole first part of the song is about what they say in the movie. It’s the backstory of the characters, and it’s Rumi picking up the mantle that her mother had as a former performer, given the throne. “I didn’t know if I’d be the queen. I was meant to be.” Zoey lived two lives, torn between the two parts of her identity, being a Korean American and Mira, who was this problem child. And the idea is that they all find a kind of home in Huntr/x and together are going to seal the Honmoon. So, there were some slight tweaks around that. Maggie and Chris would come back and be like, “Oh, hey, this feels a little too this. This feels a little too this,” and we all found it together.
EJAE: So, collaboration and communication was literally key. Without that, this would not have worked.
Mark Sonnenblick: Yeah, yeah.
The Playlist: You two are music industry vets. You know that sometimes you write a song and you love it, and then whether it’s on a soundtrack or as part of someone’s album, it might not come out for another year, another two years. You never know. How long ago did this part of the process happen?
Mark Sonnenblick: Well, “Golden” was the latest one.
EJAE: Yeah, “Golden” was the most recent one. We wrote that last year. I think it was last year.
Mark Sonnenblick: Yeah, so it was slightly under, I think we did it last right around now. But “How it’s done” was the first one.
EJAE: That was 2023. Yeah. I mean, to be honest, for me, I was on the project for four or five years. And so yeah, there were a lot of songs, honestly, “How it’s Done,” the very, very first rendition of it was the first song ever written for this movie I’m talking about, before the script was written. So, like, yeah, some songs came later, and some songs just took forever. So it was interesting. It was a lot, because again, we have to make sure every song is intentional. It was not just like, “Oh, let’s write a pop song” and fit it in. It was like the story was king. We had to make sure that the story was there. Then we write the songs for it.
Mark Sonnenblick: And it’s also because it’s so tied to the movie. I remember when Ian sent the mixes, just hearing all the songs, and it was amazing. And they all sounded incredible, and I was so excited about the music. But a huge other part of the reason this is successful the movie is beautiful. And you don’t know. You see some cuts, but I had not seen a fully animated version of the movie until basically it came out. And so you, there’s this whole other component, you see sections. But once I saw that and I was like, “Wow, I think they made an amazing film here.” And even then, it’s like, “Will this breakthrough, will it reach people?” And I mean, the fans and the word of mouth, it’s like, it’s the only reason we’re here.
