You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Yeji is a singer, songwriter, and producer from New York.
When she was a kid, she moved between Queens, Atlanta, and Seoul, Korea.
When she was in college, she started DJing and releasing her own music.
That led to two EPs in 2017.
And since then, she's also done remixes for Dua Lipa, Charli XCX, and Robin.
Yeji won the International Breakthrough Award at the AIM Awards in 2020.
And this week, she's releasing her debut album, With a Hammer.
For this episode, I talked to Yeji about her song, Passed Me By.
She sings in Korean and in English,
and she told me how using both languages gives her a broader palette to express her ideas.
I like flipping the pages and feeling the physical weight of how much time has I was in London,
winter of 2021, and I was kicking it with my friend Matt.
And we were revisiting Kid Cudi's catalog for some reason.
And in the track Kid Cudi made with MGMT, Pursuit of Happiness,
there's a synth that recurs throughout the whole track.
that I can't sing it well.
I think it kind of goes like, and it like repeats over and over.