INTERVIEW: Jay Chang’s Imaginative, Musical World

Jay Chang/ FM Entertainment and ATLocal

“I have a really hard time expressing myself through conversation,” Jay Chang admitted to me one afternoon over coffee.

His voice is soft and quiet as he considers how he helps himself on days when he’s too in his head. “Music was the only time that I could really show people what I’m feeling or thinking,” he told me. “Every single one of my songs is like a tattoo of what I was feeling at the time. It’s like a piece of art imprinted on me.”

In those moments, when the world becomes a little stressful or the walls feel like they could close in, Jay retreats and builds something new with his imagination.

“When the pressure gets too big, I try to create a new world, whether that’s creating a new one with writing or immersing myself in one through the silver screen or video games,” he said. Jay is a big fan of movies and bingeable TV series, especially true crime. The Sopranos and Breaking Bad count amongst his most favorite shows, and lately he’s been inspired to write stories like these, too. 

 “Back in the day, I kind of wished I wasn’t me,” he remebered. He knows his fans can relate to these feelings of being an outsider. But he hopes that maybe his art can speak to them. “Being able to immerse myself in something new, even just for a small fraction of time, helps me.” 

Life has changed a lot for Jay over the past two years. He’s grown from a musician recording and writing songs in his bedroom to an FM Entertainment trainee now based in Korea. He reminds me of the guys I hung out with in college who sang in bands and played guitar (Jay can do this, too), but what makes Jay cool is that he is all of those things and he is training to debut as a K-Pop idol.

Jay loves music, and his decision to sign with FM Entertainment comes from their decision to put music first. “The moment that I decided I wanted to join FM was actually when I sat down and talked to everybody at the company. I realized it wasn’t so much a music entertainment business but a company that cares about music.” 

This focus on the music, and not just the concept or the styling, was important to Jay. I liken him to being the ultimate Bias Wrecker. Think a guy who plays drums and guitar, writes his own music, and cultivates an open, authentic persona online can’t be an idol? Jay Chang would like to prove you wrong. 

“Music was always there from the beginning. I knew nothing else so this path was set in stone for me,” Jay recalled. 

He grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey, a place he characterized as, “where all the Italians are”. As a kid, he passed by the Bada Bing Club, not quite understanding its significance or how relevant it was to his city until years later when he watched The Sopranos. But despite the references to Italian mobsters, Hackensack, New Jersey is surprisingly quiet. Idyllic, even. 

It was his father who passed on a deep love and appreciation for music to Jay. “My father has always been a musician so I grew up around him and his band, listening to them play. He’s very into the 80s punk culture,” Jay explained. In college, his father was a fixture on the college radio charts and fairly quickly, his band became popular enough to tour. 

“But then at the last minute the drummer quit,” said Jay. “So he was never able to experience that kind of life.” As a result, Jay’s father hated drummers. “He wanted me to play guitar so bad, but I just started banging on stuff.

More specifically, Jay says, ”I started playing music right out of the womb.” His earliest memories are family dinners where he would take silverware and begin banging it on his plate. His dad eventually supported the hobby. 

When Jay was three, his parents bought him a small, miniature drum set that was baby blue. The drum set was simple and only contained a snare, a tom and a kickdrum, but Jay wore it out. “There’s a photo,” Jay tells me, “of me sitting at the drum set turning around and facing the camera. Maybe that’s when I knew.” His father now has it framed on his desk. The picture reminds him: Music is in Jay’s blood. 

The moments Jay seems to cherish the most from his childhood are the drives he’d take with his father, listening to the rock music his dad played in college.  “My dad driving me around his hometown in Jersey to all of his spots stemmed a lot of inspiration for the music I do now,” he told me. “It wasn’t until high school that I began to develop my own musical identity.”

When he was a teenager, Jay saw a friend post BTS music videos on Instagram. While the music his father played him was produced and performed by mostly white men, BTS exists inside of a cannon of music created by and (originally) for an Asian audience. Jay, who is Irish and Chinese/Filipino, was awestruck.

‘I went to Youtube and literally just looked up the word ‘K-Pop’,” he said and laughed at the memory. “And the first thing that came up was the BTS ‘Fire’ video.”  

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said to himself and felt a little breathless. 

“They were dancing, they were rapping, they were singing, there were explosives happening,” he said and even in his recounting I could hear how inspiring this was to him. “Growing up, all I had wanted to do was be a drummer, but after that I realized, ‘Wow, I want to sing!’” 

What makes K-Pop so exciting for Jay is how the genre combines so many diverse voices and styles to create something wholly original. That ability to shapeshift and to use musical influences to build something new interested Jay. 

“It’s just like cooking,” he said about K-Pop and creating music. “Every single cuisine in the world uses the same ingredients but when you put these certain things together it makes something completely unique and it’s very similar to how we create music.” 

Jay and his best friend Beomhan/ FM Entertainment and ATLocal

Jay decided to give K-Pop a chance in 2018. That year he attended a K-Pop training academy where he met Beomhan. The two clicked instantly. While at the academy, Jay was offered the opportunity to appear in the reality show “UNDER NINETEEN”, where many of his fans first spotted him. 

“After I went on that show I got an offer from an entertainment company in Korea,” he said. “But what was promised and what happened was very different.” 

The company’s promises never panned out and Jay left, jaded about K-Pop and reluctant to return to an industry that had burned him. 

Meanwhile Beomhan, a trainee at FM Entertainment, was preparing to tour the United States when his company asked if he knew of another singer who could join him. Immediately his mind went to Jay. The two had kept in touch since the training academy and Beomhan knew how much Jay had gone through over the past six months. 

“Jay needs this right now,” he thought to himself and instantly tried to get Jay to join him on tour. But Jay remembered feeling “extremely skeptical” when Beomhan approached him with the offer to join him. 

“But he vouched for FM a lot,” Jay said, and he trusted Beomhan’s judgment. Beomhan, too, had participated in an American company that had burned him. When FM reached out to ask him to “give K-Pop one more chance,” as he told me, it felt like the perfect opportunity. 

“I was still very unsure if music was worth it or if my passion and reality were able to be the same,” he said. “It had been on and off for seven months but I was getting time by myself to think about what’s going on.”

Eventually he decided that he would regret it if he didn’t take this chance more than if he went and failed. “Now I think that as long as I do what I can,” he theorized, “and take all the measures that are within my power, then no matter whatever happens, I can live without regret.” 

One of the first songs by Jay that captured my attention was “Four Seasons:”, a piece of music that was written during a really dark time in Jay’s life. His gorgeous voice takes flight in the chorus as he explores how love can be the grounding force as the seasons of life shift. “If I lose you,” he sings over an acoustic guitar with a gorgeous falsetto, “This crystal view as I know it will disappear as you’re going/ And I don’t want to/ Cause every season comes every reason to start again.” 

“I would never wish that period didn’t happen,” he said of when he wrote the song. “It was such a dark time however I’m really thankful it happened because something really beautiful came from that.” 

The first time I heard “Four Seasons” I was so intrigued - and impressed - that Jay would also be interested in K-Pop. There is a range to Jay that I want others to know about. He can play indie rock, pop, and he can even rap. But it is his voice, strong and vibrant, that is the through-line in all of his work. In his latest single “The Awakening” with Beomhan, his voice is powerful. 

“He has the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard in my life,” Beomhan told me when I asked what he liked most about Jay. “But he’s also extremely funny and very empathetic.”  

Jay is still fresh in his career, but as he grows and matures, I hope all of these sides of him, the beautiful layers I see in our conversations, can be felt in his lyrics. Although Beomhan is also clear on one unique trait of Jay’s: “He’s also just so weird. He’s so unpredictable.” 

“I’m weird, in an eccentric way,” Jay agreed. “Because my mind works in ways people don’t really understand or in ways I don’t even really understand.” 

But I would offer that these parts of him that are so eccentric and strange are what makes him compelling. There is an emotional maturity to his lyrics that make him a captivating force – and one that I am eager to see as a force in K-Pop that pushes the genre farther into introspection.  

Your first chance to hear a new style of Jay’s will be at the end of the month when he releases his new single, “Liar”. 

“This is completely different from the songs I write,” he said. “One of our lablemates, Roda, produces our music and he wanted to make a song that shows a sexier side of me.” He described the song as a louder, poppier sound than anything he’s released before. It reminds him of G-IDLE’s “TOMBOY”, and it was fun – if not challenging – to create a new image for himself.

“It was a huge learning process for me because I didn’t know that was possible. I don’t look at myself that way,” he said and laughed. “Writing lyrics like that was a huge learning experience. But I’m excited for this single.” 

Jay’s choice to believe in his music and to trust that he could succeed is what led him to the point he is at today. He thinks of his father often and throughout our conversations it is clear how much it means to him to continue something his dad never finished. 

“He was never able to experience that kind of life,” Jay said. “So in a way, what we're doing is me trying to make up for this missed opportunity.” 

As he seeks to understand how he can fuse all of these influences together, from the early days driving around Jersey, listening to music with his father to the K-Pop scene he is immersed in now, Jay looks to navigate a career that he hopes will be as complex as he is.  

“I like putting all of these puzzle pieces together,” he said and smiled. “It’s a lot of fun for me.”