JYJ is back with a new album, also their first Korean-language release as a trio. Yet not much has changed for their singing career since their first-ever album, an English-language global release, as JYJ late last year due to their conflict with their past agency through which they pursued their activities as TVXQ. Hence as much as the tracks to the new album are composed and/or written mostly by the group's members Kim Jaejoong, Park Yuchun and Kim Junsu, they contain their honest thoughts and feelings on the past year.
10Asia took part in a press conference held in time with the release of the album "In Heaven" and heard about their work as a group and individually.
Q: You made a lot of the songs to this album. How does it feel?
Jaejoong: Great. To start with, I cherish it and in a way, I think it's an album that contains a lot of the memories and inside stories about ourselves on the past year. So while we're very proud of it, it's an album that also contains a lot of nostalgia. At the same time, we can't say that we made each of the songs purely for this album because we actually made them, one by one, for our concerts since we can't show the public or our fans our music on television for certain reasons. So it has a different significance for us.
Q: How did each of you work on your songs with the rest of the members of your group?
Jaejoong: We had good chemistry because we've been together for so long that we know each person's strengths and weaknesses so without having to elaborate, we all knew why which part was given to whom and how the parts were divided up the way they were.
Junsu: I tend to ask everyone's opinions and try to reflect what they say because that way, we can come up with things that even I hadn't thought of and that's the extent to which we trust each other when it comes to music. That's why I also reflected their opinions for deciding on the title of my songs.
Q: What style of music were you thinking of for your songs?
Junsu: Well I made "Mission" and "Fallen Leaves" and with "Mission," I tried to produce a tune with a strong beat and majestic sound with the thought that the album should contain a performance-oriented song. And with "Fallen Leaves," I wrote the melody first and then the lyrics to it around two, three in the morning when I was in Taiwan and I wanted to sing of what I feel on the inside yet couldn't express on the outside. The 'Starting again' to the chorus at the end of the song was supposed to be sung just once but I wanted each of the members of the group to express it as well so Yuchun sang it once, then Jaejoong, then me... a total of three times. 'Starting again' is the message I wanted to deliver most to the public.
Q: Well it seems that you put a lot of time and effort into the show so it must be a bit of a shame that broadcaster KBS declared it didn't comply with their broadcasting regulations.
Jaejoong: It's disappointing but it happens a lot, even at least once or twice to other artists as well. So we weren't too disappointed over it at first... it had happened to us when we were TVXQ as well. But I guess the issue at point is 'why' it didn't pass their review. The process through which they created a term based on their arbitrary judgment and imagination, without asking the song's creator about its meaning not even once, and then said it didn't comply with their standards, is what's odd and frustrating to us.
Q: What does it actually mean then?
Jaejoong: Performer Sucess Museum. Everybody wants to see their lives succeed. Yet that success only becomes possible with the help of a certain institution where one receives the help or training of another person. For example, if a school or academy is a museum, the people at that institution lie to the people who are looking for hope. They pretend to tell them, 'We just want to help you, regardless of the material compensation.' So that's what we were trying to say. But to assume that it means President Soo-man and notifying that to the song's creator is disrespectful.
Q: Since it's difficult for you to promote your music on television, concerts are probably the best way for you to meet with your fans. Hence I'm guessing you also try to make them more special.
Jaejoong: When we hold concerts, we usually allot a lot of time to talking with our fans. To the extent you won't be able to tell if it's a concert or fan meeting because we really have very few means of communicating with our fans. That's why we've come to focus our singing career on concerts and although it's very hard to, we try to perform every song of ours and talk to our fans as much as we can. Even when we have a set theme for each concert, we end up ignoring it and just goof around.
Q: Will you have a theme for your upcoming tour in Europe?
Yuchun: We don't try to try to change our style to fit that of the location we're performing at. We may change the set list but overall, we try to integrate our unique style to the culture of the country we're at.
Q: Isn't it difficult to predict what the turnup will be for countries like Spain though?
Junsu: 'Will we be able to pull it off?' is the same thing we said for our North America tour this year because we'd been to Los Angeles but never to Vancouver, New York, let alone New Jersey. But we realized that there were actually a lot more fans that had waited for us in those cities than we'd expected. So we feel pressured and are worried but we're trying to think positively. Us having gotten this far in itself is a miracle so we're just hoping that the miracle will continue. Plus, we just heard that over 80 percent of the tickets for our Spain show got sold so we're very happy about that.
Q: Well your concerts may have done well so far because you have a set fan base but you'll have to keep gaining more fans as well. How are you going about that?
Junsu: One thing I felt for sure after Yuchun finished "SungKyunKwan Scandal"... I'm not sure with Jaejoong yet since "Protect the Boss" just finished... is that we gained an entirely new range of fans. I used to recognize most of our fans, at least their faces although not their names, because we used to see them so often but the new fans we have... They're entirely different in terms of how they dress or... And it seems that some of them didn't even know that he's actually a singer. They thought he was a new actor but realized he was a singer and became curious of who the other two guys next to him are.
Jaejoong: We're very lucky. Singer's fans base usually stay the same or get changed but we have fans who are aging as we do as well as gaining new and older fans so I think we're terribly lucky. (laugh)
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10 아시아 Reporter : Park So-Jung nineteen@
10 아시아 Editor : Jessica Kim jesskim@
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