Damn Idol Episode 25
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Chris Edward had always thought of himself as someone luck followed.
His life so far had been like that.
Even when he didn’t particularly want them, opportunities came to him, and when he seized those opportunities, good things happened.
It was luck that he, who had thought he would spend his whole life in Denmark, ended up studying abroad in England, and it was luck that his roommate happened to be the guitarist of a fairly famous band.
If he went back even further, it was luck from the moment he learned piano from his grandfather, who had been a children’s song composer.
Those bits of luck piled up one by one and made him a composer.
A song he had made to hit on a girl was sung by his roommate’s band and gained popularity, catching the eye of a promoter.
Not to mention what happened after that, when he arrived in America and succeeded on Billboard.
But lately, he felt as if nothing was going his way.
Every song he worked hard on turned out mediocre, and the promotion for his new release had been completely ruined because of a political issue in America that had nothing to do with him.
After his success, even his personal and business relationships began to creak, and troublesome matters kept cropping up.
Until now, whenever he found himself in a situation like this, “something” had always happened and his life had smoothly worked itself out…
But apparently, not this time.
“Alex, I think I need to take a vacation.”
“Again? You just went on one not long ago.”
“Not a fake vacation squeezed into my schedule. A real vacation.”
His manager shrugged and turned the laptop screen he had been looking at toward Chris.
“Before you go to an airline website, check this out first.”
“What is it?”
“This came from a Korean broadcasting station. Is this really a song you composed? I’ve never heard it before.”
“Korea?”
Chris Edward had a pretty good impression of Korea.
He had been captivated by the eloquence of a Korean director he happened to meet at an awards ceremony and impulsively accepted the job of film music director, and it had become a huge hit. ‘I was lucky.’ Especially considering it was an awards ceremony he originally shouldn’t have been able to attend because of his schedule.
“What song is it? Film music?”
“No. K-pop.”
“K-pop?”
When Chris Edward tilted his head, his manager played the video.
On the laptop screen, Korean girls were singing…
It was a song he had never heard before in his life.
“This is a song I composed?”
“That’s what they’re saying.”
“What kind of nonsense is that? As if I’d use this chord progression…”
But Chris stopped before finishing his sentence.
The vaguely mediocre song playing from the laptop was not something he had made.
And yet, he had the feeling that he had heard it somewhere before.
To be more precise, the overall development centered around the highlight melody felt familiar.
“Wait, hold on.”
Chris pulled the laptop closer and began concentrating on the song, but he was still confused.
But the moment he went back to the intro to listen to it again, he realized.
A song that chose the flute as its main instrument and began with a cold, dispassionate melody.
This was a song he had composed.
With that certainty as a starting point, he remembered when he had made the song and who he had sold it to.
He even recalled the working title he had given it at the time.
This was a song he had composed after seeing a flower blooming among the snow in the insanely cold northern region of Norway.
“That’s right. I made this song. But why the hell did they change it like this?”
“It is yours? Then it’s a contract violation. Does it make sense for there to be a song your agent doesn’t know about?”
“No, no. This isn’t a song made by Chris Edward. It’s a song made by Pelle Jørgensen.”
Pelle Jørgensen was Chris Edward’s real name.
But his management had thought that an unfamiliar Danish name would be a minus on Billboard and suggested the stage name “Chris Edward,” and by now, he was using it almost like his real name.
“I needed money, so I participated in some song camp. But the composing wasn’t going well, so I put out a song I’d made before. Norwegian Flower.”
“How was the contract? Are you still getting royalties?”
“I think I sold it as a buyout? Was it ten thousand dollars?”
“You sold a song outright for only ten thousand dollars?”
“At the time, it was an enormous amount of money. Back then, there was no one looking for me, and I had no money.”
“How many years ago was this?”
“Five? Six? Around that.”
“You weren’t very good back then. The song is just so-so.”
At his manager’s words, Chris Edward bristled.
“What are you talking about? The original wasn’t like that.”
“Then?”
“It was a song made for a male singer from the start. Honestly, I thought it would be good if it went into a Hong Kong noir film.”
“Jackie Chan?”
“Whatever it was, it wasn’t supposed to be like that. Who messed with the scale so crudely? What’s the singer’s name?”
“Way From Flower. The track title is Flowers Bloom.”
After listening to Chris Edward, his manager Alex fell into thought for a moment, then operated the laptop.
Soon, he showed Chris Edward another screen.
In the paused image, a pale-skinned boy was standing while holding a microphone.
“Then what about this?”
“What is this? Another one of my songs?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t remember selling any song other than Norwegian Flower.”
“Well. It might be your song.”
Chris shrugged and played the paused video.
Then, the same flute-centered intro as the one he had heard earlier flowed out. ‘What? It’s the same song.’ He wondered if Alex was showing him a cover, but he focused on the video.
Alex was a capable manager and the promoter who had led him to success on Billboard, so Chris trusted him.
At that moment, the song began to change.
The intro had clearly started the same way, but at the opening, the scale dropped sharply.
It seemed to have been lowered by roughly a perfect octave…
It sounded good.
But that was not the end.
Once again, the scale changed for two measures.
Since he wasn’t listening through monitoring headphones, he couldn’t tell exactly, but it was about eleven semitones.
After that, the scale kept changing, then suddenly rose again.
It was probably the scale of the song called Flowers Bloom, and it was interesting how the boy’s song, matching it, shot upward in his full voice.
Like that, Chris Edward lost himself in the boy’s singing in the video.
He liked everything about it.
If there was one thing he didn’t like, it was whether the boy really needed to dance, but thinking about it, that was amazing in its own way.
At a glance, it was a completely raw live performance with no AR at all, and yet he was handling more than 80% of the live singing while dancing. The remaining 20% seemed to have been left blank with the mindset that if he was going to sing it clumsily, he would rather not sing it at all…
But his choice of those points was no joke.
He knew exactly where to create empty spaces so that listeners would feel at ease.
“Wow.”
When the song ended, Chris Edward had no choice but to applaud.
“I can feel an incredible talent. How old is this guy? No, more importantly, what does he do? Is he a Korean Bieber-type singer? What is this song? This is the original, and the girls covered it, right?”
“Calm down. Calm down and watch the interview this Korean boy gave first.”
“Are there subtitles?”
“They sent both English subtitles and Danish subtitles.”
“They’re serious. It also feels like they know quite a bit about me.”
He could sense that some broadcasting station in Korea, whose name he still did not know, was planning something.
“Let’s watch the English version. So we can watch it together.”
“Sounds good.”
—I think this was its original form.
—Flowers Bloom was probably a song for a male vocalist in the early composition stage. Perhaps during the production process, the singer was decided, and they changed it to suit a female vocalist?
—So I don’t think I changed anything. I just think I sang it in its early version.
After reading the interview subtitles, the manager asked in a subtle voice.
“I already watched this interview. And I thought it was bullshit… But judging by your reaction, I guess it isn’t bullshit?”
“It is bullshit.”
Norwegian Flower had indeed been composed for a male vocalist.
It also seemed true that the company that purchased the song had changed it for a female vocalist.
At Chris Edward’s words, his manager tilted his head.
“Then isn’t everything he said right?”
“The most important part is wrong.”
The song the Korean boy had created by touching the scale was not the original version he had made.
The feeling itself was similar.
The development expanding around the main melody was similar, and the intention of which melody was used for which expression was also similar.
He had even handled the intentional dissonant scale falling from the interlude into the chorus in the exact same way.
But…
The level was different.
At the time, Chris had not possessed the skill to make a song like that.
“That isn’t the song I composed. It’s the ideal form I imagined while composing it.”
Just because he lacked skill did not mean he lacked imagination about the result.
He had simply been unable to actually output the killer sound hovering in his head.
The song the Korean boy had sung was something that had existed only inside Chris’s head.
The song he had actually composed was worse than that.
It was absurd.
He listened to a song whose vocalist’s gender had been changed, inferred the original form, and then sang it in its ideal form?
Was that possible through talent alone?
“But they say the boy named Sion only touched the scale and didn’t arrange it?”
“Sion? His name is Sion?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a name that suits his tone well.”
“Answer the question, would you?”
“Ah, right. He touched the scale, but he didn’t arrange it. That’s why there are awkward sections here and there. But Sion definitely finished the arrangement in his head. And he sang according to that.”
“How do you know that?”
“Can’t you just tell when you listen?”
Throughout the whole song, the final form of the song that the boy named Sion had drawn came to him on its own.
It was undoubtedly an incredible song, and an incredible skill.
He was definitely a genius.
Meanwhile, Alex scratched his head.
Chris thought he had made it this far because he was lucky, but that was not how Alex saw it.
Chris was also an incredible genius.
It was just that most of the triggers for that genius came from external stimulation.
Like now.
“Hmm, hmm—.”
After humming for a while and constructing the melody, Chris suddenly sprang up from his seat.
“The vacation is canceled.”
“You’re going to Korea, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. I need to meet that boy named Sion right away.”
Chris Edward thought that “luck” had come to him once again.
He even thought that the reason things had not been going well lately was so that he could meet the boy named Sion.
If composing had been going well and the promotion had been running smoothly, there was no way he would have been watching this video.
“What are you going to do when you meet him? Give him a song? Or work together?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t have a purpose?”
At Alex’s question, Chris Edward grinned.
“When geniuses meet, something is bound to happen.”
After saying that, Chris left the hotel room, and Alex let out a hollow laugh.
What was the point of leaving the room when he wasn’t going to Korea right this second?
Thinking that, Alex looked at Sion in the paused screen.
Honestly, he himself could not feel the kind of genius in this song that would make Chris marvel.
But he trusted Chris Edward’s judgment.
“Yeah, it’s me. I’m going to forward you an email now. Try communicating with the broadcasting station that sent it. Find out what they want to do with Chris, and how much they can offer.”
If something happened when a genius met a genius, turning that into money was the job of management.
And Alex was one of the most capable talents even within the massive management company HR Corporation.
“But don’t give them a definite answer under any circumstances. Make it sound like we’re approaching them out of simple curiosity.”