Eric Nam

“One of my first interviews was Robert Downey Jr. for 'Iron Man.'”

“I don't know why I feel the need to try and do everything. But I kind of have this mentality that you live once, and I have a lot of things that I want to do and there's a lot of things that I want to try. So I have to at least give it a shot before I don't try at all or like, give up on things.”

“I would be criticized, like, 'You don't talk Korean enough. You sound very American. You sound very white in your music.' And I'm like, 'Whoa.'”

“I feel like people have stereotypes and notions about Latin America that aren't necessarily accurate or aren't particularly positive. For me, Latin America is a place that I personally really love and enjoy visiting and going to, and I wanted to be able to show it in a light that was very different to an Asian, Korean viewer.”

“I feel like I've always been drawn to a very diverse range of music and I've always enjoyed experimenting, so I'm not quite sure where exactly my music will go.”

“I was criticized a lot when I was singing in Korean. The producers and people from my agency would point out my accent and tones, and would tell me I sound too American to fit the local market.”

“I had accepted a position as a business analyst at Deloitte Consulting in New York. But before I went into that workforce, I decided to take a year off and went to India to do a social enterprise fellowship. It wasn't the best fit, but that was where a TV show in Korea found me and invited me to first come perform.”

“Coming to Korea and becoming a singer, I always had two big goals personally. One was to be able to make it at some point so that I could do good things - I was always raised with an interest in social impact, philanthropy. The other thing was to be able to take my music and do it on a global scale.”

“I try to be honest with myself.”

“It's easy to talk about how great love is or how you feel heartbroken after a breakup, but it's not as easy to talk about the process of going through the end of a relationship.”

“A lot of my peers, be seniors or juniors, they'll text me or they'll call me and they'll say, 'Thank you for doing the music that you do because it pushes the genre forward in different ways.' It's a very rewarding thing to hear.”

“It's so wild to be able to say that I can do shows in front of thousands of people and have them sing my songs in Korean and in English - that is wild to me.”

“Sunbae-hoobae seniority is a very tricky, weird kind of thing.”

“So I don't have a normal, regimented schedule at all, but on a normal day, I'd say I wake up around 10 A.M.”

“I'm grateful that the public think of me as a sweet guy, but there are times when I get worried that my behavior would disappoint the public. I'd like to show them that there are different sides of me.”

“Whenever I write my music, it's always been in English first and then I take it into Korean.”

“I think representation is something that's absolutely needed. I felt like with K-pop being so hot, we could leverage that to potentially do something bigger with music in the States that people could latch onto.”

“I think Korea is so focused on just the charts, and what's going to chart and what's not, and I'm sure it's like that way in the States as well, to a certain degree. But I enjoy working in the States a little bit more. Because it's more about making music that is the right sound and the right fit to me, not so much just chasing the charts.”

“Oftentimes you're breaking out because your face is lacking moisture or hydration.”

“No matter what job or industry you're in, life is hard, but we're all going through a difficult time and the best thing we can do is pick each other up and move on together.”