KUALA LUMPUR: BTS member Jimin has disclosed that his first solo song, Promise, was initially intended to be a dark tune, and not the uplifting hit that fans are crazy about.
According to Soompi, the 23-year-old idol spoke about the mellow pop ballad released last month, during a Naver V Live broadcast after BTS’ concert in Singapore on Saturday.
He said that it took about seven months for him to write the solo track, which was co-composed with producer Slow Rabbit.
“My feelings and thoughts were dark and gloomy at the time, so everything I wrote ended up being in that same vein,” he said.
On what had actually inspired him to write the song, he added: “My personality is very wishy-washy and I have a hard time being honest. I ended up writing this song because I hated that about myself."
“Why am I unable to bring myself to say the things I want to say? If I’m having a hard time, I want to be able to say honestly that I’m having a hard time. But because I can’t do that, I get frustrated watching myself. I think that’s why I ended up writing the song,” he said.
Jimin then added: “I was basically one step away from cursing at myself (in the lyrics).”
On the title of the tune, Jimin said that the word “promise” came to him while performing at BTS’ historic concert at Citi Field in New York, after the popular K-Pop group became the first Korean artiste ever to hold a solo concert at a stadium in the US.
Speaking about the lyrics he said: “If you listen to the song, I use the word ‘you’ a lot. ‘You’ actually means ‘me'. Because this was originally a song that I wanted to write to myself.”
Jimin added that RM, who also co-wrote the lyrics to the song, had written all of the English lyrics.
“Because I’m not good at English, I would ask him multiple times to translate what I had wanted to say in the lyrics in English. Namjoon (RM’s real name) helped me a lot,” he said.
Jimin added that things eventually got better for him. “I hung out with my friends, I spent a lot of time talking to the other BTS members, and I was able to see all of you during our concerts. That made me realise that I had been mistaken.”
“I had thought that I was alone and struggling by myself but it occurred to me that there are probably very few people in the world who talk openly about their lives and their problems,” he said.
“There must be many people who have bigger problems than I do, and there must be so many people who have never been able to speak honestly about their lives,” he added.
After coming to that realisation, Jimin explained that he wanted to make a promise to himself. “If life makes things difficult, I won’t make things difficult for myself. I won’t insult myself,” he said.
“I hope that lots of people would hear the song and that it would comfort them as well. That was what I had in mind while I was working on the song and that’s how I was able to think of the exact words that I wanted to say. That’s how the song Promise came into existence.”
He also thanked BTS’ fans, or ARMY as they're known, for liking his song. “Thank you all for listening to it so many times,” he said.
In just a day after it dropped, Promise managed to garner over 8.5 million streams online, which broke SoundCloud’s record for the highest streams in 24 hours after a song’s release.