How K-Pop's Eric Nam Forced Himself to Learn Korean

Hey guys, we're at the Fonda Theater in Los Angeles, where Eric Nam is performing tonight. And check it out. He's hanging out inside right now. He has a few minutes to talk to us. Let's see what he's up to. I saw you rehearsing, you looked great.

Yeah, thank you, thank you. I'm excited. I'm never really nervous until I get on stage. So, it hasn't really hit me. But once I'm there, I'll probably have a mini freak out and then it'll be fine.

You still get nervous?

I do. I do. I haven't I haven't performed like a concert show in a while. So it's my first show in a in quite a while, so hopefully everything's locked in and checked away.

Do you have any like pre-show rituals that you do? Like a bunch of push-ups or like

What do I do? I always try to like brush my teeth and like listerine, because I feel like I need to have like a clean mouth as I project my songs out. But that and then probably just a good meal.

Is this the first night of your tour?

It is. This is opening night of my first ever North American tour.

Okay. So, you've been on tour before, but this is your first North American tour.

Yeah. Well, I did like, I do a lot, a string of one-offs just all through Asia and then sometimes in New York, Atlanta, wherever, but for it to be one cohesive piece of work, this is probably the first time. 15 cities, doing 16 shows. Wow. I'm excited. Like, I've never lived on a bus. I know. Yeah. Uh, to be traveling with a crew, a huge crew and uh, I think it'll be fun. It'll be new, it'll be fun, and I'm just more than anything excited to meet my fans.

How did you get started in this whole music career? I mean, you started on YouTube, didn't you?

Yeah, I uh, it's a weird story. So I graduated, I had a job at Deloitte Consulting, locked away, and I took a year off to go to India to do service work. But while I was there, a TV show in Korea picked me up off of YouTube, and I went to Korea to do like The Voice Korea. I got to the top five. One thing led to another, I had a record deal. And then, in Korea, you kind of have to do everything. You have to be on TV, you got to do radio, you got to do just everything. So I started doing a bunch of TV shows. One of them was basically reporting and interviewing other stars.

That's incredible. You were just going to be a consultant.

Yeah.

And now you're a huge star.

Yeah. Isn't that crazy? It's still crazy to me. Still, it blows my mind. I'm still incredibly thankful and I I feel blessed.

What do your parents think?

They're uh, they weren't very happy at the beginning. Um, but they're they've come around and they're very supportive and uh, it's it's always fun. It's kind of weird because they keep tabs on everything I do. And some of this stuff they're like, why would you say that? I was like, I don't know, Mom. Just leave pretend like you didn't hear it.

You were born in Atlanta, right?

Yes, I was born in Atlanta.

And now you can speak Korean.

Yeah.

How did you pick it up so easily?

Because I was forced on to TV on a regular basis. I it was like survival mode. You gotta pick it up or you're gonna die. And so I forced myself to learn it and just got better and better the more I worked at it.

Because some of your songs are in Korean too, right?

Yeah. So most of them are in Korean and now we're trying to reverse engineer things back into to English. Do a little bit of both. Yeah. So we have a good mix of, I mean, even the tour, I'd say 50% is English, 50% is Korean.

And you have this new album that just came out. Yeah. Honestly. And you just shot that new video, and you shot it in Mexico, didn't you?

Yeah, I shot all the stuff in Mexico. I love Mexico. I love going, I love visiting. I love the food, the people, the culture, the music. And I felt like Mexico is represented typically in a way that's very negative in some ways. Particularly in Asia, the the stereotypes around it are very, it's dangerous, it's, you know, all these unfortunate things happening there. But for me, I fell in love with just like the beauty of the the place and the people and I wanted to showcase that a little more.

You've worked with Timbaland before, right? Did you produce a song with him or?

Okay. So we did a song called Body about a year and a half, two years ago. Okay. He was like super nice, like the most like easy to work with person, producer ever and Yeah. given how he's so legendary, I thought, I think I had preconceived notions of what he'd be like, but he was just so cool.

So what are you going to do after the show? How do you unwind?

I will be unwinding on the bus. So we leave at 1:00 AM to San Francisco. Oh, man. And we do it all over again tomorrow.

I'm glad that we got to hang out and I think you're going to have a great show tonight. So nice.

Thanks for coming out. Appreciate it.