October 22, 2018. I don’t have the best memory, but I think I’ll always remember that Monday. At 11AM, as my middle school classmates and I drove into New York for a week-long field trip, my friend Lindsay and I scrambled at our phones, refreshing SoundCloud and cursing the shoddy network. When the app finally loaded, we both clicked the play button. Wired headphones in, we watched the New York City skyline slowly come into view.
mono., the second mixtape by RM of BTS, marks my memory of that trip. At the time, I was 13, so I don’t think the lyrics resonated as deeply as they do now. This is what I admire most about music. The song is still, frozen in time by the musician, but it grows as you grow. What a song means to me is unique from what a song may mean to someone else.
In high school, as I began experiencing more complex and, to be frank, more dark feelings, mono. grew to be a companion in that dark room. It became a friend to my solitude. mono. is not a happy record. It’s an honest record, bittersweet. It’s introspective and wistful, discussing things like RM’s love-hate relationship with Seoul and the gap between his ideals and his reality.
I digress—this isn’t about mono. I bring up the mixtape to establish the distinctive quality of RM’s music: its ability to be so raw and vulnerable that it doesn’t only hurt, it comforts. I also bring it up to acknowledge the crazy ability of his music to come out at crucial points in my life. His newest and first official solo album, Indigo, came out in the final stretch of my college application process and the final stretch of childhood before adulthood.
I thought for a while about how I want to break down this album. Track by track? Recurrent themes? I think it’s best to discuss the resonance of this album, specifically with regards to creation.
Indigo, released in December of 2022, has been in the making for four years: one of the tracks, “Forg_tful (with Kim Sawol)” is unchanged from how it was recorded in 2019. “Lonely” reflects his emotions from while BTS was on tour, and “Change pt.2” was recorded drunk, the grittiness and angst of his voice left untouched from the original recording.
This album first touched me as a creator. Text on the physical album and in its promotion reads:
Record of RM: Indigo. From the colors of nature, human, etc.
Use it while taking a walk, a shower, a drive, coffee-break, work, dance, read a book, when flowers bloom or fall.
the last archive of my twenties.
Documentation of my youth in the moment of independent phase. An honest, unadorned record with shades.
Sun-bleached record faded like old jeans.
Before it even came out, reading these phrases confirmed to me that Indigo will be introspective, but a different kind of introspection than mono. The insistence not only to listen to the album, but to use it. RM is known for his lengthy, reflective letters he posts to fans. A section of one he posted before the release of Indigo reads:
It would be nice to have everyone like it, but with a daring attitude of “well, if not, what about it” and with the confidence of believing that there must be one shade of blue that pleases you out of the ten, I will see you tomorrow.
It reminded me of this newsletter. My ultimate goal is for readers to gain something from my work, whether they like it or not. If someone agrees, I hope they have this as something comforting to return to. If someone disagrees, I hope my writing helps clarify what they do align with. Likewise, he encourages listeners to take his work and use it, even if just one of the ten tracks resonate with them.
As I listened (and relistened.. and relistened..) to the album, I felt a familiar flame light up inside me, the flame of creation. It’s what got me to start this newsletter. The flame is an itch to make something, to gather up a part of your soul and express it. Hearing RM describe his work as a “documentation of [his] youth” made me so badly want to create something and call it mine.
In the film describing the making of the album, RM says, “In my opinion, the greatest work of art is taking the most personal story and telling it in the most universal way.”
Let’s pause. Something I admire most about life is when someone explains something a certain way and makes you realize that you’ve known that all along, but haven’t been able to put it in words. My psychology teacher would probably call this latent learning—learning something subconsciously and not realizing until the knowledge is applied. When I first heard that, I texted my best friend about how I made it four minutes through the video before I had to pause and process.
Telling the most personal story in the most universal way. I knew this all along. Intuitively, this has been my goal through every newsletter I write, but hearing it articulated this way made it glaringly clear that this was my goal. What I am able to do with my writing is take my most personal experiences and express them so that they’re relatable. I am not alone in them, and neither are you. What RM, and so many like him, are able to do with their music is put vulnerable feelings out into the world, allowing millions of people to resonate and identify with them.
If mono. was my companion in a dark room and a friend to my solitude, Indigo is the friend who encourages me to live a little and break out of my shell, to open my eyes and embrace the world. Just as mono. reminds me of New York, I can’t wait to see how I will remember Indigo in the future.
Here are some relevant links:
Indigo on Spotify
RM’s letter
RM 'Indigo' Album Magazine Film
English Lyric Translations (and cultural context)
Tiny Desk Concert with NPR
I have so much to say about this album and its tracks, but I think I’ll never have enough time for that. The tracks that resonate the most with me today are “Wild Flower (with youjeen)”, “Change pt.2”, and “No.2 (with park jiyoon)”.
Thanks for reading. Let me know if you give it a listen.
Love,
Aarushi.