Her agency crushed her K-pop idol dreams. Her reinvention brought them back to life
(CNN) — Her voice defeated soul-eating monsters during the emotional finale of the blockbuster animated film “KPop Demon Hunters.” But for Korean American singer Ejae, the triumph gave her something beyond fame and fortune.
Validation.
Years prior, Ejae was an aspiring K-pop star signed to one of the biggest entertainment agencies in South Korea. Starting at age 11, she had endured over a decade of demanding round-the-clock practice. It’s a common path for K-pop wannabes: Sign with an agency, train in dancing and singing, then hope the agency selects you to debut as an artist.
Ejae never debuted; her agency let her contract run out without ever selecting her for a group.
“I worked hard. I tried my best to make sure my voice sounded cleaner or dance better and to look a certain way. But I think I just didn’t make my mark,” Ejae told CNN in a recent interview. And when the constant competition and pressure began to affect her schoolwork, “I just felt like I was failing at everything.”
“For a long period of time after (leaving the agency), I did feel very hopeless,” Ejae added. She’d risked it all, spending her youth on a dream that hadn’t panned out.
But Ejae wasn’t done with the K-pop industry just yet. She took one more risk: She reinvented herself as a songwriter.
That path led her back to New York and, eventually, to “KPop Demon Hunters.”
The movie, the most-watched Netflix original film ever, centers around a Korean girl group that hunts demons with their songs to protect the world. Ejae co-wrote and recorded demos for the chart-topping soundtrack — most notably its uplifting anthem, “Golden,” which won a Golden Globe for “Best Original Song” this month. It’s up for four Grammys in just a few days and an Oscar in March. (Ejae is also the singing voice for the film’s purple-haired protagonist, Rumi.)
“It’s pretty rare for someone like Ejae, who’s a former trainee, to really blow up this big,” said Claire Marie Lim, an associate professor at Berklee College of Music and K-pop expert.
Lim, who was a K-pop trainee around the same time as Ejae, said most people she knew left the professional music world if they didn’t debut as K-pop idols. Some current K-pop stars might be involved in songwriting and production, but it was more unusual a decade ago — especially for former trainees.
“The attitude at the time, like 10-plus years ago, was: ‘You’re meant to sing, dance, rap, model, do a lot of forward-facing things, but not really take part in the creative process behind the scenes,’” Lim said. Ejae was pursuing a “super rare” path that she would essentially have to create herself.
The grueling K-pop machine
Ironically, the movie that made Ejae a star is an ode to the Korean pop music machine that disillusioned her all those years ago.
“KPop Demon Hunters” reflects how K-pop artists, also known as idols, bask in the glow of light sticks and fan chants. But in real life, their fame comes with a high price: harsh beauty standards, 3 am call times for broadcasts, public backlash for dating and more.
Even becoming a K-pop star often requires years of intense training, spending “hours a day dancing and singing and rapping,” Lim said.
On “The Zach Sang Show,” Ejae described going to vocal and dance practices after school and staying until midnight. (She also wasn’t the first in her family to pursue a career in entertainment; her grandfather was a famous actor and producer in South Korea in the 1960s and ‘70s.)
The massive K-pop machine is notorious for its artist development and production programs. Agencies meticulously plan out public debuts, coordinate every detail of schedules and fan interactions and even oversee many parts of stars’ personal lives.
Trainees are also heavily scrutinized for their skills and appearance, often starting when they’re very young. Ejae was 11 years old when she joined SM Entertainment, one of South Korea’s biggest entertainment companies.
“There’s a lot of competition, a lot of critiquing. There were competitions within the training system where I’ve failed a lot and was rejected a lot,” Ejae told CNN. “I’d constantly been hearing, ‘You’re not good enough, you’re not good enough.’”
When her contract ended in 2015, Ejae was in her early 20s — already old for a K-pop trainee.
It’s an exceptional case when agencies do debut older idols, “and I didn’t meet that exception,” she said.
With ‘Golden,’ she went platinum
Ejae described her departure from SM as a breakup: a mutual breakup, but heartbreaking nonetheless. She had spent her formative years enmeshed with the company, and now she was on her own.
“I didn’t know what to do with my life,” she said.
She’d developed an interest in producing while at New York University, where she studied music during a break from training. Encouraged by her mom and brother, she would go to DJ performances in New York and ask them questions after shows.
“‘If you want to get something, you have to be proactive’ — that’s always been instilled in me, and that was honestly the start of my journey of discovering myself as a writer, whether it be producing or not,” Ejae said.
She spent hours each day teaching herself to use music software and how to make beats. She was intrigued by production, in part because she didn’t see many women in that side of the industry.
While figuring out her next move after SM, she did a studio session with a Korean producer. She thought they were going to make beats. Instead, he wanted her to write a song.
“The last song I’d written…like actually wrote the melody and lyrics — was in college for a project, and it was a Christmas song and it was terrible,” she recounted. “So I was like, ‘What?’”
But she gave it a go, and to her surprise, she fell in love with writing pop songs. The song she wrote that day was picked up and released as “Hello” by K-pop singer Hani.
Although Ejae never debuted as an idol, the training helped her understand the structures and melodies that would work for songs. Andrew Choi, who would become her mentor, heard “Hello” and brought her onto his team and to SM songwriting camps. (Choi is the singing voice for Jinu in “KPop Demon Hunters.”)
“I think he saw potential in me, which I didn’t see,” she said. “Sometimes it just takes other people to see something in you for you to believe in yourself, too.”
Since then, she has co-produced or co-written for a string of big-name K-pop acts, including Twice, Suzy and Aespa. Perhaps her most recognizable hit is “Psycho,” by Red Velvet.
For “KPop Demon Hunters,” she’s credited on four tracks, including “Golden.”
Maggie Kang, the movie’s creator and co-director, said she contacted the songwriter at the suggestion of her husband. Ejae was initially brought on as a songwriter in 2019 and offered the lead singing role around 2022.
“We cast Ejae first. We had the demos and knew that we wanted Ejae to do the vocals,” Kang told Forbes last July. In a social media post, she said the demos helped the film get the green light.
Ejae, for her part, was more hesitant. She had never been cast in a movie before, and, at the time, no one knew “KPop Demon Hunters” would go on to become a global phenomenon. She enjoys being behind the scenes, where there’s less pressure, she said in an interview with The New York Times.
“What made me say yes is the efficiency,” she said. “I wrote the song; I know the nuances and how to sell it. I was confident about that.”
Now audiences are belting out her lyrics, and the music has given the movie a life beyond the screen. “Golden” held the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 for weeks last year, heard everywhere from grocery stores to dentist offices. Other “KPop Demon Hunters” songs similarly dominated the charts worldwide, with hundreds of millions of Spotify streams.
It’s a full-circle moment for Ejae. Twenty years after she hoped to be a K-pop star and 10 years after her dream was crushed, her voice and lyrics are reaching listeners across the world.
“Golden” even found its way into global affairs: The leaders of Japan and South Korea recently played the song on the drums together in an usually loud display of diplomacy.
When “Golden” won its Golden Globe, Ejae referenced her time as a trainee – and her reinvention.
“This award goes to people who’ve had their doors closed at them,” she said, accepting the accolade with her co-writer and producers. “I can confidently say rejection is redirection, so never give up.”
The-CNN-Wire
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