Anyone who covers film and music quickly learns a handful of interview clichés that rarely yield revealing answers — questions like “Where do your ideas come from?” or “Did you expect this to blow up?” usually get a version of “No, I couldn’t have predicted that.”
But at a recent press event for the film KPop Demon Hunters, writer-producer Kim Eun-jae (who records as Ejae) offered a different response: from the moment she sketched the melody for the film’s breakout single “Golden,” she knew it had something special.
Ejae — who provides the singing voice for the film’s lead, the half-demon K-pop star Rumi — wrote several tracks for the soundtrack, including “Golden,” “How It’s Done,” “Your Idol,” and “Hunter’s Mantra.” The idea for “Golden” arrived unexpectedly while she was driving to a dental appointment; the trip coincided with her getting a gold filling, an odd little moment that stuck with her and fed the song’s concept.
“When the melody came, I thought, ‘Oh — this is really good,'” she recalled. “Sometimes a tune arrives all at once, and that’s what happened here.” She and co-writer Mark Sonnenblick took the idea into a Zoom session and, unusually, found the hook, chorus, verse and pre-chorus arriving almost simultaneously rather than in separate stages.
The pair later sent the finished draft to producer Ian Eisendrath, and Ejae still keeps the screenshot of his ecstatic response: a short, emphatic message declaring the song “massive” and calling it a potential smash.
Co-director Maggie Kang described her own visceral reaction when she first heard the track. “I remember being in a car on my way to the airport,” she said. “Ian told me I needed to listen immediately. I put my AirPods in and, within a few notes, I started crying. I knew right away — this was it.”
KPop Demon Hunters is streaming on Netflix and has quickly become one of the platform’s most-watched original films. For more about the movie and its soundtrack, visit Netflix’s top titles or read our coverage of the phenomenon.
Source: Polygon
