Bobo.Xx Knows This Pain Will Be Useful One Day

In a new interview, the singer opens up for the first time about the lifelong challenges that inspired his punchy new single “TELL ME WHY”.

In 2023, when Bobo.Xx crashed into the alternative rock scene with his viral single “PAIN”, he was like a masochist on a mission for beatings. “I gotta feel pain/ To make me feel alive,” he shouted with a fiery rage and fury in the chorus. The dichotomy of this pain, as Bobo told me in an interview later that year, is that it can make us appreciate the sweeter parts of life. 

But Bobo.Xx has never been an artist who floats by on easy subjects. He is, by all accounts, an artist who reckons destruction and totality. On his new single “TELL ME WHY”, the singer questions his mortality and his tolerance for discomfort. “This fight wants all of me,” he sings, “Tell me why I’m alive.” 

This single, Bobo told me in a recent interview, is about a fight that the singer has never openly discussed until now. 

“A lot of my struggle comes from not only my mental health but also my physical health,” Bobo explained. “I deal with some real autoimmune issues I don’t openly talk about and even some of my friends don’t know that it renders me from going one thousand percent at all times. I can’t help but think how much more I could maximize my potential if I wasn’t so limited.”  

These moments, while sitting at home alone in his apartment, are when the thoughts get to him. “It’s a sad thought when I sit with it for too long,” he said. “This song is really talking about the times I’m paralyzed in bed by myself, missing out on all the moments I could be having and trying to find the drive to continue chasing things in life.” 

Yet, for all of his struggles, Bobo has still accomplished a great amount of work this year. In June, the singer was tapped to star in a commercial for the 2025 All New Toyota Camry, something that he is still extremely proud to be a part of. (“Life be feelin real poetic when you shoot a commercial with a car that you grew up in 20+ years of your life,” he wrote on Instagram.) Bobo also served as a photographer for Eric Nam’s House on a Hill Encore show in Los Angeles, and hit the road again with Epik High for their PUMP UP Tour, as a photographer and doubled as an opener on several dates. (Bobo invited me to the Atlanta concert where I got to see firsthand how he runs around the venue like a bat out of hell capturing every single moment on stage and in the crowd.) 

In August, Dive Studios brought Bobo on for “Carpool Conversations”, a new series hosted by Nam, which allowed Bobo to share his message of resilience with a much wider audience. And throughout it all, he still maintained a frenetic pace of releasing singles, including the excellent “Falling Backwards” and “Kerosene”. 

When I asked how he juggles so many roles, Bobo was reflective. “In my life, I think the intent is all the same. I’m just constantly trying to get better and express my honest self every day.”

What’s helped keep so many different fires burning, Bobo told me, is to have deadlines to hold him accountable. “The pressure of a timeline pushes me to constantly go, go, go!”

Bobo’s fanbase has grown considerably this year, with many of his songs performing better than ever before on Spotify. And in a real show of his growth, a sizable portion of Epik High’s fans have shared Bobo’s speeches and insane showmanship on social media. “It’s kinda nice to see my own growth and have an audience grow with me. I’ll be like, ‘Damn, why did I edit that photo that way? Why did I make that melody on that song,” he explained, before adding, “Even though sometimes I’ll look back and cringe a little, it’s still a process of growth and learning to accept parts of myself I put out there. And that in itself is a beautiful experience.”

“TELL ME WHY”, then, comes as a release from a lifetime of hard work and constant grinding. This is something that Bobo is familiar with: His career has come not from easy wins but furiously hard fought battles. 

“There’s so many amazing things I’ve been blessed with these past couple years that sometimes I just feel over encumbered by the weight of it. When you’re on tour or in the pocket of creating things, it feels like you have purpose every day as you're performing and adding into moments that mean so much that when you get back, life just feels so… mundane,” he explained.

“Most days, there’s just so much emptiness when I’m by myself in my apartment that I just have all these thoughts racing through my head since I’m not on a tour bus surrounded by twelve people every morning or in and out of sets and studios,” he continued. “I guess it’s nice to decompress. It’s just a strange shift.” 

Something I’ve always admired about Bobo is his willingness to tell the truth. In his lyrics, his transparency is refreshing. On tracks like “Airing It Out”, he makes no apologies for his darker feelings. Bobo has never tried to fit into a mold. He is, instead, an agent of change. He is frank and straightforward when he talks about how there is no place for men who look like him in this industry. “There’s no one that represents me and I had such a problem with that. There’s just these people that I can’t relate to,” he told me in our first interview. “I’m not one of those crazy smart Asians. I didn’t grow up rich.” Eventually, Bobo decided to say fuck it and break his own glass ceiling. 

But there’s something different, perhaps more tender, on “TELL ME WHY”. Here, for perhaps the first time, Bobo contemplates what it would mean to give in to the darkness. “All the walls keep closing in/ I’ll be ready for the end when I’ve lost the reason why I’m still alive,” he sings in one of the most poignant lines. 

“TELL ME WHY” is by no means a ballad, but it does carry the same amount of weight. It is one of the punchiest songs in Bobo’s discographies and also one of the most transparent about his struggles. 

This fact isn’t lost on Bobo. “When I say, ‘This fight wants all of me’ it really means it takes every ounce of my being to continue and accept the fact that one day, it might just take me and to realize I might not always win,” he said. 

But Bobo isn’t up for quitting. He has more work to do; more once-in-a-lifetime tours to photograph, more music to make that gives a voice to other people like him. Most importantly, he has more of his story that he wants to share. Talking to him, you understand very quickly that there is so much more life and resilience that feeds into the frenetic pace that he works. 

“One thing I do know is every moment I persevere with all my shortcomings makes me more resilient to whatever happens in life,” he said. “The fact that I’m able to get this far and do this many things along with all the negative aspects of my life is a blessing. That’s honestly the real story of the journey.”