If you spend any time in entertainment journalism, you learn pretty quickly that there are a few cliché questions that successful creators get all the time, and that almost never produce interesting answers. “Where do you get your ideas?” is the biggest no-no, but “Did you have any idea your [book, movie, song, show, etc.] was going to get this big?” is a close second. The answer is almost always some variant on “No, I had no idea. How could I have predicted this?”
But at a press conference with the directors and singing cast of KPop Demon Hunters on Tuesday, songwriter and producer Kim Eun-jae (who goes by Ejae, professionally) had a surprising answer: She knew the movie’s breakout hit “Golden” would be a massive hit as soon as she wrote it.
Ejae, who performs the singing voice of the movie’s primary protagonist, half-demon K-pop star Rumi, wrote the songs “Golden,” “How It’s Done,” “Your Idol,” and “Hunter’s Mantra” for the movie. “Golden” is currently in its seventh week on top of the Billboard Hot 100 global singles chart. She explained that the idea for the song came to her while she was driving to the dentist, where she coincidentally ended up getting a gold filling in one tooth.
“When I got the melody, I was like, Ohhhh, this is a good melody,” she said. “That happens sometimes when the melody comes really fast. So I was so excited to get my gold filling done and go home and put it down and have my co-writer [Mark Sonnenblick] come on Zoom, and that’s how we would write. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, Mark, I have this melody — I think it’s pretty epic.”
She says the back-and-forth between her and Sonnenblick went unusually quickly, with the hook, chorus, verse, and pre-chorus coming “all at once,” rather than in the usual composition stages. Afterward, she said, “Literally Mark and I on Zoom were like, ‘Did we just write a hit?’ It sounded so good.”
After that, she said, she sent the song to producer Ian Eisendrath. She says she still has the screenshot of a text he sent back that said, “‘This. Is. Massive!’ He was like, ‘This is a smash, Ejae!'”
Co-director Maggie Kang said she had a similar experience when Eisendrath sent her the song. “I know exactly where I was — I was going to the airport, I was in a car,” she said at the press conference. “Ian was like, ‘Maggie, I just need you to listen to it right now.’ So I take my AirPods out, and I’m listening to it, and I heard the few notes in the beginning, and then I just had tears. I really knew exactly — I knew it was it. It’s just so magical from the beginning. And I was like, Oh my gosh, we finally got it.”
KPop Demon Hunters is streaming on Netflix, and has topped the charts as Netflix’s most-watched original movie of all time.
