After more than a decade of turning love, longing and heartbreak into some of South Korea’s most enduring ballads, Paul Kim is opening a new chapter with his first English-language single, “Love Me Hard”. But beneath its bright pop melody lies a more personal confession: a love letter to the very thing that made him a singer.

Since making his debut in 2014, Paul Kim has built a career around capturing the emotions that often prove difficult to articulate. His catalogue has become part of the soundtrack to countless personal milestones, relationships and memories. Yet, as Paul understands it, the feelings that make a song last rarely belong to the person who wrote it. They belong to the people who find themselves in it.

Where he once returned to the emotional experiences that inspired him, he now prefers to explore a theme more deeply, developing stories that extend beyond the boundaries of his own life – and his latest single, “Love Me Hard”, marks another step in that evolution. Marking his first English-language release, the track introduces Paul to a wider audience through a brighter pop sound, without leaving behind the emotional honesty that has defined his work so far.

There is, however, more to the song than its invitation to international listeners. While its lyrics can be heard as a plea for someone to return an affection with equal intensity, Paul reveals that the track also reflects his relationship with music itself. Having left university to pursue the career he had always wanted, he knows what it means to give everything to something without always feeling that the love is returned.

It is a revealing perspective from a singer whose work has so often helped others make sense of their own relationships. For Paul, perhaps the most interesting love story is the one that has accompanied him throughout his career: the enduring relationship between an artist and the music he cannot imagine living without.

“Love Me Hard” is your first English-language single. Why did this feel like the right song to introduce a new side of your career to international listeners?

Paul Kim The title says it all, really: “love me more, hold me a little closer.” For people meeting me for the first time, I felt it was a song that could draw them in. It’s also bright, both in the melody and the overall mood, so it felt like an easy, comfortable way to start: something you can just put on and enjoy.

You’ve built a career around songs that capture the complexities of love and heartbreak. Is there a particular emotion or experience you find yourself returning to most often when you write?

I used to try to go back to the moments when I first felt those emotions. These days, I try not to. So much time has passed that I can’t really feel them the same way anymore, and there are so many new things in my life to write about. Now I focus more on understanding a theme deeply and telling a story that fits that situation.

Your songs often leave listeners feeling as though you understand something they have struggled to put into words themselves. When you’re performing, do you ever find that a song takes on a different meaning because of the audience’s reaction to it?

I don’t remember exactly which song it was, but at one concert, I was singing a song I’d performed countless times, and it suddenly felt so unfamiliar that I wondered, “Did I really write this?” Moments like that are why I never get tired of singing the same songs over and over. The audience’s reactions make the songs feel like they’re being born again.

Your music has built a lasting connection with listeners in South Korea, particularly through songs like “Every Day, Every Moment”. What do you think makes a love song stay with someone long after the circumstances that inspired it have changed?

Ballads in particular tend to stay with people through certain memories or moments. So what lingers isn’t so much the story in the lyrics or what I felt while singing it. It’s what was happening in each listener’s life when they heard it. Rather than feeling exactly what I felt, people create their own private emotions around the song, and I think that’s why they keep coming back to it.

You have spent much of your career singing in Korean, where the emotional nuances of a lyric can feel especially personal. What has it been like expressing those same kinds of emotions in English, and has the change in language revealed anything new to you as a singer?

English isn’t my first language, so of course it wasn’t easy. Working on these lyrics, I realized that being able to speak English and being able to write lyrics in English are completely different things. I tried to focus on what I could express with the vocabulary I have, and I also learned a lot of new expressions along the way. But the theme of a song and what I want it to say don’t change with the language, so the process itself wasn’t that different. That said, there were plenty of moments when I thought, “This melody, or this feeling, just works better in this language.”

After more than a decade in the music industry, what have you learnt about yourself through songwriting that you might not have discovered otherwise?

Songwriting may have shaped my image as a musician, but what I’m most grateful for is that it gave me a way to let out the feelings that were weighing on me. Through writing songs, I discovered just how emotional and sensitive I am, and that helped me release what I was holding inside. Honestly, becoming a singer-songwriter is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

A live clip of “Love Me Hard” was first revealed at Los Angeles’ Chimac Fest in August. What was it like seeing the song introduced to an international audience for the first time?

When the live clip was first revealed at Chimac Fest in August, I wasn’t there, so it’s a real shame that I couldn’t see it in person. If I get the chance, I’d love to go there myself and perform for my fans overseas, and for people meeting me for the first time.

Your music has often been associated with ballads and original soundtracks. As you move into English-language pop, are there particular sides of your musical identity that you hope international listeners will discover for the first time?

OSTs are about telling the drama’s story rather than my own experiences, so they were a bit limited in showing who I am as an artist and as a person. My own songs don’t have that limitation, and that’s what I love about them. With this English song, I hope listeners connect with something that isn’t written from a drama character’s point of view, but comes from what I, Paul Kim, actually think and feel.

Looking back at your career since your 2014 debut, how has your understanding of love changed, and do you find yourself writing about it differently now than you did when you first started making music?

Some of my songs are about my own life, and some aren’t. When I get inspired, I often develop the story rather than writing it down exactly as it happened, so my understanding of love shifts a little from song to song. In the past, I described love as something vague, something you can’t quite hold on to. Lately, I’ve been trying to explore and understand new kinds of love. So the love I sing about now is a bit more real. I’m looking for more stories that people of all ages and in all kinds of situations can relate to.

With “Love Me Hard” opening this new chapter, what would you like someone who has never listened to your music before to understand about you by the time they reach the end of the song?

“Love Me Hard” is about love, but a bigger part of it was written with music itself in mind, as if music were the person I love and dream about. I love music so much that I dropped out of university and gave up a lot to take on this challenge. But sometimes, it feels like music doesn’t love me back quite enough. I wrote this song thinking about those moments. So feel free to think of someone you love while listening, or think of the person you dream of becoming, or the future you’re hoping for.