In the time between the previous chapter’s recording and this one, I moved to Korea to teach English. I flew out of Orlando, where my dad was living alone while starting a new job, on Christmas Eve. I had never traveled internationally or by myself at all or visited a larger city than Washington DC once in middle school. I’ll always remember the experience of waiting through a slow customs line at Narita airport as my connection to Korea boarded and then running with my bags to just barely make it before they closed the plane and being the last person to board, dragging myself down the aisle sweating and winded as a plane full of Korean adults in neat business attire all stared at me, the ugly American.

I was picked up at the airport by my new manager, whose English name was drawn from a global asset management company, and he drove me through the kind of gleaming neon metropolis I had only ever seen in movies. That night, he dropped me off at a love hotel (hotel rooms used for affairs but also, because they’re cheap and widely available, for other purposes like temporarily housing ESL teachers) where I would be staying until my permanent apartment was ready. My room had various seductive lighting options and a large bathtub and in the dimly lit hallway were large bookshelves filled with porn DVDs. I Skyped my parents (they had generously bought me a Dell laptop before I left) so they knew I was okay and then, even though I was deliriously tired, hooked up my guitar, mic, mini 25 key MIDI controller, and audio interface to make sure my gear had survived the journey and I was still able to record.

The next day, I woke up and went outside into the world by myself for the first time. Busan, where I would live for the next year, is the second largest city in South Korea, on its southeastern coast. It was winter in Busan and I had been living in Florida for the last six years, so I did not own any clothes warmer than a light cotton hoodie. Luckily, winters there were relatively mild and I had the warm blood of a 22 year old. I remember going out for a run that first morning along the beach boardwalk and through an infinite spaghetti of irregular pedestrian alleyways (I had only ever lived in suburban strip mall sprawl). Before I left, running on fumes but anxious to go to a restaurant by myself for the first time, I drank some energy drink looking thing in a small brown glass bottle in the hotel’s mini fridge, which turned out to be a laxative.

During that very first run exploring my new city (and for much of that first winter), the album I remember listening to over and over (on a portable MP3 CD player, a transparent orange Walkman, possibly the only one in active use in the entire country at that point) was Night Falls Over Kortedala by Jens Lekman, which had come out in October of the previous year. After being introduced to him by a college roommate who was very into Scandinavia, I had known some of his earlier music, like “Maple Leaves”, which had a punny chorus after my own heart (“She said it was just make believe / but I thought that she said maple leaves”) and near the end of college, I had also gotten into one of my favorite bands, the Silver Jews, because of Lekman referencing them. He borrowed lines from SJ frontman David Berman’s poem “Governors On Sominex” for my favorite of his songs before Night Falls Over Kortedala, “You Are The Light”, this joyful horn-powered march, and had written about the influence anxiety in the charming lo-fi blog he kept in an HTML file on his website:

March 8th , 2005

I just want to write a quick note about this: You know I didn't win the grammy for best lyrics a month ago , and I said in a couple of interviews that if I did I would give it to someone. If I would have won I would have sent it to David Berman...

My song "You are the Light" contains lines taken from his book "Actual Air". To make a long story short, I once got a loveletter that contained the lines about using your one phonecall to dedicate a song and the phrase "you are the light by which i travel into this and that" written in swedish. I translated it back to english and made a song out of it unaware of the words origin. Even though I had a copy of the book that I'd read and loved , the similarity never struck me until last year when it was too late.

All of a sudden I had a radiohit in Sweden. And soon it started playing on the college radio stations in America. I've been feeling bad about this. I've been in contact with Bermans publisher and offered song credit and royalties but never got a final decision on how to proceed. I never heard back from him... I decided to keep quiet about it thinking that mr Berman was embarrased about the whole thing. But during the last month I've been getting a lot of credit for those particular lines in articles and reviews and I don't want anyone to think that I'm trying to get away with it.

Please pick up a copy of Actual Air. It's honestly one of the most beautiful collections of poems I've ever read. David Berman is one of my biggest influences in writing lyrics and everytime I read the book I'm inspired to create new music and make up new stories.

favourite songs right now:

* the Silver Jews - I'm gonna love the hell out of you
* Nat Baldwin - (untitled 13-track CD-R)
* the Impossible Shapes - the Princess
* Feist - Mushaboom

Night Falls Over Kortedala was such a special album because I felt like he was doing something that nobody else I listened was really doing: using sampling and production techniques from hip hop and electronic music but deploying it to make quirky indie songwriter chamber pop, to me a beautiful dialectical synthesis of the era’s rockism/poptimism. It was bright, shiny, joyous music full of surprising and delightful texture and melody and rhythm, but also deeply personal and emotional and clearly the product of an idiosyncratic (and hilarious) mind and heart. There are so many good songs on the album, so calling out “favorites” is hard, especially after listening to the whole album for the first time straight through in years with Deborah yesterday, so I will just write some loose fragments on each song:

• “And I Remember Every Kiss” - thunderous tympani and syrupy strings, building from sotto voce to a shout
• “Sipping on the Sweet Nectar” - joyous disco (incl. upward key change, a classic metric of joy) which tries to represent the joy of being so happy in the moment a way you’ll remember much later
• “The Opposite of Hallelujah” - great piano riff, includes the line “I took my sister down to the ocean / but the ocean made me feel stupid”, one of the poppiest choruses on the album (which is really saying something)
• “A Postcard to Nina” - i don’t normally like story songs but this one, about Lekman pretending to be his lesbian friend’s boyfriend at a dinner with her parents, is hilarious (and has an incredible tempo speed up)
• “Into Eternity” - more weird disco, this time with accordion in additional to flutes, more cowbell
• “I’m Leaving You” - bouncy melancholy piano pop about ending a relationship because you don’t love the person
• “If I Could Cry (It Would Feel Like This) - he’s such a gabby songwriter but this one has no words other than the one in the title; it’s all about the inadequacy of words (also i’m always a sucker for parenthesis in a title)
• “Your Arms Around Me” - he combines melancholy and joy/humor in a way that. this is not my favorite song on the album, because i am a happy music purist, but i think it might be yours?
• “Shirin” - rare acoustic guitar song on the album, perhaps the only love song i know of devoted to a hair stylist? this song and the previous one show how great his falsetto is.
• “It Was a Strange Time in My Life” - This is my only skip on the album; it has some interesting moments and sounds, but it feels too long? idk, in terms of where you would put this song on the album, it’s the right place, i just don’t think it’s the right song.
• “Kanske Är Jag Kär I Dig” - the most wonderfully silly song on album? the interplay of sampled doo-wop harmonies, chicken scratch guitar, drum machine, nonsense lyrics, and then an incredible horn break during the instrumental session. probably my favorite if i was forced to pick just one (though i don’t think it’s “best”).
• “Friday Night At The Drive-In Bingo” - adorably twee rhyme-giddy sax bop (“my heart’s beating like Ringo”)

In his contemporary review of the album in the magazine The Word, the writer Andrew Harrison contrasted it with “landfill indie”, a term he coined for the uninspired guitar music then trending across the pond.

What’s kind of sad is that now, twenty years later, Night Falls Over Kortedala itself is in a kind of landfill. In 2022, it was removed from streaming services and online stores because of clearance issues for the samples used to compose it. Lekman rerecorded the album’s songs (and added some more) and released the new collection as The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom, and while I find this to be a much more valid move than the empty imperial feminism of Taylor’s Versions (aside from “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” which i do ride for!), the old ones are the ones that live in my heart, so I’m grateful the original is still there to stream on Youtube (and probably, in some actual landfill in Korea, on a CD I burned).

In Busan, I stayed in the love hotel for a week waiting on an apartment, adjusting from jet lag, and doing training for my new job. There was another teacher starting at the time, this guy Chris from San Diego, so we got paired up. The “training” was really just sitting in the back of classrooms watching existing teachers work. The first day I had to teach, my first experience of the course materials was in the five minutes before the first class where I was to teach them to a group of elementary school students; this repeated for each class throughout the day. My work/life attitude in adulthood, regardless of the task, has mostly been “I can wing it” and I do attribute some of that to being forced to wing it in front of cranky Korean children. The main conversation I remember with my teammate Chris is sitting across from him on the subway on the way to a dinner at some American chain restaurant (Chili’s, I think) and him going on a rant about people with blogs being losers (he didn’t know my entire life and sense of self-worth was oriented around mine! though it did kind of prove his point).

At the end of the first week, my manager told me he had good news: my permanent apartment would be ready the next morning and even better, that night, the entire company was going out for food and drinks and karaoke together! As a person whose main tool for dealing with intense social anxiety was drinking, Korean drinking culture, where you aren’t supposed to ever refill your own drink, was stressful at first, but we also had really good Korean sashimi (the first time I'd ever had sashimi) and eventually I got drunk enough to be enjoying myself. After dinner, everyone piled into taxis and went to a karaoke place near the beach where all the rooms were named after Impressionist painters (our group was in Monet).

I had never done karaoke, had in fact, despite having recorded lots of music at this point, never really sung anything in front of other people in real life? My coworkers were mostly singing Korean songs but passed me the song binder opened to a section where the songs were in English. I flipped through desperately, trying to find something which would triangulate a karaoke sweet spot of “familiar enough that others know it and can sing along” with “I am a hipster and I need the song to signal that i have cool taste so if there are other cool people here, they will think i’m cool.”

I studied this songbook like it was the Talmud, repeatedly getting drunk-nudged by a coworker and asked if I’d picked a song yet, and when finally I felt like i couldn’t delay anymore, I submitted and got up in front of everyone. It was only then that I learned, once and forever, one of the cardinal rules of karaoke, which is that, before you even get into considering this matrix of audience familiarity and hipster cred and the vibe in the room, if you are not sure you know the entire song, you should not sing that song at karaoke.

I had picked, as my first Karaoke song ever, the song “Heart of Glass” by Blondie, which in my panicked searching I thought matched “familiar” but “undeniably cool.” Which, maybe it would have been, except the only part of “Heart of Glass,” a song, if I’m honest, I had mostly heard in needle drops in music and TV, was the “Once I had love, it was a gas / soon found out, I had a heart of glass” part and you know what it turned out there are whole other parts of that song! I dissociated for several minutes and eventually it was over and I could sit down.

After that, the official outing had ended and most people went home, but some of the younger teachers went to this bar on Dalmaji (Dalmatian) Hill, which was this cool neighborhood up on a steep hill overlooking the ocean. I was very very drunk at this point, so drunk that in trying to flirt with a girl while playing pool, I made some joke about how I needed to take my glasses off to make a shot (which is crazy because I have bad vision and am bad at pool even when I can see) and shoved them into the pocket of my jeans, where they immediately broke. I left the bar at some point after that and started rambling down the hill toward the direction of the area my love hotel was in and while I’ve wandered home drunk many times and blacked out a few times before in my life, in this case, I truly have no idea how I got back to that hotel! I think eventually I got a cab (I have a shard of fragmentary memory about this), but I don’t know how I would have even told them where to go.

I woke up incredibly hungover to a loud phone ringing and a pool of my own vomit on the floor beside my bed. The phone call was an admin staffer from my school (English name “Roy”) who reminded me that he was going to take me to my new apartment. I frantically got dressed and packed my stuff. I felt horrible about not cleaning up the vomit and left a very large tip on the bed before fleeing to meet Roy at his car. He drove me to the new apartment building, brought me up (I was on like the fifteenth floor I think?) and showed me how to get in, and then, maybe sensing how hungover I was, took me back down to one of the convenience stores across the street to buy some water and crackers. We came out and were standing waiting to cross the street again when I politely turned away from him and vomited into the street. He smiled, we crossed back, and I went up the elevator to my new life.

In theory, this is a series about music I recorded, and there are two primary recordings in this chapter. Both are directly related to The Hills, which, once I got settled in my new apartment, I was continuing to deliriously blog about even though the next season of the show had not yet started airing (I wrote fan fiction to fill the gap).

The A side of this issue is the very first song that I recorded once I got settled in Korea, a cover of Heidi Montag’s song “Higher.” In 2026, we have recently survived the terrifying possibility of Spencer Pratt becoming mayor of LA and thank fucking god. Even as Hills-pilled as I was at the time, I did not think this was a particularly “good” song (you can hear me laugh during the vocal track at one particular clunker of a line) but it was a fun song to make my own (this uses the original’s lyrics and not much else). The thing about me and guitar or any instrument is that I basically am terrible at learning how other people do things? Like forget about reading and learning sheet music, i have never successfully memorized a tab in my life. I know chords and I know scales and I’m good at finding parts that sound good and improvising, but I can’t really do anything other than “me” (but I do that well!). Also, as someone who has spent the vast majority of my music time home recording myself, it’s something that really changes the rigor with which you have to practice and learn. It’s not like being in a band or even being an open mic artist where you have to keep playing the same songs over and over again in shows: if you’re just home recording one-offs, you can fuck up as many times as you need to and once you’ve got a decent take for a guitar part, you don’t have to know how to play the guitar part again.

The B side is a “cover” of LCD Soundsystem’s “New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down” but with the lyrics changed to be about Whitney Port and her Hills spinoff The City. This song was recorded and released much later chronologically (my lyric describing Whitney as “the belle of banal” was quoted in the New York Times Magazine), but I’m including it now because, in this first winter in Korea, when it was too cold to run outside after I got off work at night but I desperately needed to burn off some energy and soothe my mind, I would run up and down the stairwell closest to my apartment in my building. This was not a great experience for a number of reasons, including a) running stairs always fucking sucks b) there were motion activated lights in the stairwell that would go off between floors leaving me in temporary darkness until I’d breached another landing, and c) said staircase was a common sneaky cig spot and it smelled like it. But I was desperate for endorphins and so I ran, mostly listening to Sound of Silver, especially "North American Scum," "Watch The Tapes," and “New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down,” which is not actually a very good running/running stairs song until you get to the end but the end would hit so good it felt worth it.

Elsewhere

• Open Video Downloader is the best way to archive things from basically any video site (this is not spon, I just use it a lot and vouch for it)