I asked Bill Rahko, who works with us, if he had any music lying around. It had little music and little melody. I was listening to an episode he made and the chorus came to mind, “You, you, my world.” And I was like, well, if I sing “You,” someone else has to sing it right away: “You, you, you, you,” like that.
I received a message that BTS was looking for a song – which wasn’t true. And I thought, don’t be silly. This will never work, don’t be crazy. But it’s stuck in my head. Anyway, the song was about people who were told they couldn’t be together — whether that was Romeo and Juliet, interracial couples, interfaith couples, or places where there wasn’t LGBTQ permission. I felt like the coolest person to sing that song with was someone we weren’t supposed to be with. It turned out to be the most amazing natural collaboration. I would do anything for these guys, anytime. They were very good. They made the song so great.
A bit awkwardly, I tried to sing fake Korean in the break in the pre-chorus — something I hope no one ever hears, because A, it’s probably wrong to do that on some level, and B, it sounded ridiculous. But then I called RM from BTS and said, “This is how it goes.” He said: It’s okay. They wrote their lyrics and then all their songs. My daughter taught me about ARMY and who everyone is. By the time I got to Seoul, I really knew about the rap group and I said, okay, we should have a section where Suga and J-Hope can do some rapping. It was a lot of fun in the studio. At first everyone was so nervous with each other, like, “What is this?” There are cameras everywhere in their world. But in the end, it was as if this was always meant to happen. Now we’re a boy band made up of seven handsome Korean guys and an old white guy, and that’s totally fine.
We just follow the song where the song wants to go – even if that song has you traveling to Korea to work with a boy band, knowing that by doing so you’re destroying any shred of cool or credibility and risk angering their fans as well. That’s the philosophy we live by… I think with all these songs that we’ve chosen for this purpose, they’ve all been allowed to be themselves, and the identity of the band has grown to accommodate that. Now, if we said, “Oh, we want to do a song with One Direction,” no one would think about it. I don’t think that’s possible now, because they’ve gone in five directions. But it’s fun to let the band grow.
