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Jay Park: 'It Is Too Early to Say That My Album Achieves Great Success'

Singer Jay Park released a mini album in Korea and the album ranked atop the music chart. He came back as a solo singer album after one year and eight months break and he was not a leader of a star idol group anymore. The recently released album entitled "Take A Deeper Look" ranked atop the chart only in a day after its release, and it was also placed on the third place on the category of "World Album" on the Billboard Music Chart. He had created a stir and caused a bit of buzz, but he could successfully take his first step as a solo singer with his new album.

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He came to a café in Apgujeong-dong for the interviewe on May 16, and said with a calm voice, "I feel very happy, but I think that it is too early to say that I have achieved a great success. Only the album was made successfully, and the song could not become very popular yet like Lee Ji-eun's song 'Good Day'. If a song achieves great success, everybody can recognize the song in everywhere because they can listen to the song in every place. But people do not know my song that much yet". He evaluated his song in a modest way, but actually his song has ranked atop the music chart of KBS 2TV's music program "Music Bank" for two consecutive weeks. In particular, he competed with senior singer Im Jae Bum, who is very well known for his appearance in the program "I Am Singer" recently. Park said, "I won at the competition, but I could not stop wondering whether I deserve the first prize. Im Jae Bum is a great singer. Even though I do not know many of his songs, I could hear his names very much from long time ago. Anyway, it was my honor to be nominated with him at the same time". He came back as a singer after a long time, so he felt with emotions.

He said, "Even though I am too busy now, I feel very happy. But there are too many unfamiliar junior singers. Most singers except four or five singers were junior singers. When they treated me as a great senior singer, I feel really awkward. I do not feel like that I am their senior singer yet. I am still very young and we do not have too much gap between us, so I actually think that they do not have to treat me as their great senior singer". The biggest difference comparing to before was that he had to hold performance alone and lead his own performance. He said, "I have to control myself very well on the stage. I also have to take care of my facial expressions on the stage as well as dancing and singing because the camera always follows me. I am not very good at looking at the camera maybe because I have never sung alone before. Sometimes I only concentrate on dancing and forget to look at the camera". His album contains his ability as a musician. He participated in making six songs out of a total of seven songs in his album. He used to write lyrics for the rap before, but it was his first time to compose songs. He said, "I could not and should not do whatever I want to do before because I held performance as a group. But this time, I could do whatever because I can create my own performance. I chose the beat that I liked and composed songs one by one. I actually had no idea or plan what kind of album I wanted to make. I just freely wrote songs after choosing a special theme. I usually wrote those songs based on my imagination rather than based on my experience". He already wrote other songs to be included in his next album. He said, "Music is my life. This song that I made recently sounds really great. Of course, it could not become very popular, but I do not care. When other musicians recognize my song, I might feel really proud of myself".

He had to go back to his hometown in Seattle when his message that he had written before his debut in September, 2009 created a stir because the message contained his bad opinion on Korea, and he has to endure many abusive comments on him even before his comeback. He kept a dauntless attitude on those abusive comments. He said, "They gave those abusive comments to me because they have interest on me. I rather appreciate their interest because they are spending their time only for me while writing something about me. They might find some lacking from me and want to let me know those points for improvement, so I think that I do not need to be offended for their comments". After debut, he could have both very good experience while enjoying great popularity and bad experience due to his previous comment. What does he feel after those experiences? He said, "I am the same person, but people come to have different images about me now. I learned a lot from those experiences. People usually can learn new things from bad experience, but I am trying to look at only good things now even though it might be very hard. Hard time will pass any way".

Jay Park is now filming a movie entitled "Mr. Idol" while holding activities as a singer. He seemed that he was not yet used to be called as an actor. He said, "I am not good at acting because I do not know yet when to present action and when to release my emotion. When I sing, there is a song, but when I act, there is nothing but me. Filming itself is very exciting, but acting is very difficult". After he finishes filming the movie in June, he is planning to record his album in English version for his fans overseas and distribute those songs for free. He reportedly very much feels like finishing this recording work as soon as possible when he really wants to do. He will also appear in the international B-boy competiton entitled "R-16" along with the B-boy team AOM, with whom he has practiced together for a long time, in July. He said, "I want to put priority on the music than acting now. I really like B-boying even though I am not that good at it. But participating in the competition might be really exciting. I love to sing and write songs that come into my head and I love to see people who like my songs".

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