Today I re-sang two songs: City Girl in Japanese, and The Soviet Cosmonaut Packed a Shotgun in English. First time I have put songs I wrote in Korean out in another language.
I have been to Japan six times. Every trip was good, and the kindness I was shown stayed with me. I wanted to give a little of it back.
Right now, someone in Japan is probably having as hard a time as I am here in Korea. So I made a short drama, as a way of saying let us get through it together. Pulling the shutter down at a convenience store, crying in a bathroom stall on the day an interview goes badly, standing outside a door after snapping at your mother. Not one person — several.
The cosmonaut one is a completely different animal. Soviet cosmonauts carried a shotgun into space not because of aliens, but because the Soyuz capsule comes down in Siberian forest and there are bears there. The TP-82 was a real object. That story already circulates in English, so English felt like the right language for it.
I swapped the lyrics and had it sung again, though it does not come out exactly as written. I only noticed once I added subtitles.
I subtitled the whole thing. People click a foreign-language song, see no subtitles, and leave.
A dark story under a bright song. I am not sure it is the right call — I just wanted the contrast. The Korean originals are on the channel too, so tell me which ones work better.