Park Jimin is BTS’s main dancer, but he’s also a talented songwriter. His self-composed songs “Christmas Love” and “Promise” recently topped the SoundCloud charts. The former went to No. 1 in Korea in the Global Beat category, while the latter became the most streamed song on Soundcloud with 285 million streams.
In a previous live broadcast, Jimin opened up to ARMY about “Promise.” He revealed that when he started working on the song, it wasn’t uplifting at all. It all started during a time when Jimin felt burdened and stressed. He needed a way to relieve his stress, so he went to their leader RM for advice.
“He told me that he relieved a lot of his own stress by making music. We talked for a long time about that, and it made me want to compose a song to overcome my feelings. So I started working on music. But because my feelings and thoughts were dark and gloomy at the time, I only had dark music in mind. Everything I wrote ended up being in that vein. My lyrics said, ‘Why are you like this?’ I was basically one step away from cursing myself in a song.”
“My personality is wishy-washy, and I have a hard time being honest,” he continued. “I started working on this because I hated that about myself. I thought I was alone and struggling by myself, but seeing ARMY at our concerts and talking to my members helped me realize I was mistaken. I realized that there are many people out there whose problems are bigger than mine. It also occurred to me that there are people who haven’t been able to speak openly about their lives. It was then that I made a promise to myself. Even if life makes things difficult, I won’t insult myself.”
Jimin revealed that he came up with the song’s title during BTS’s historic 2018 concert at Citi Field in New York, when they became the first-ever Korean act to play a stadium in the US. When he told RM about it, their leader advised Jimin to work on it while the concept was still fresh in his mind.
“So I did, and I completed the song in about one to two months. As soon as I thought of the keyword ‘promise,’ things went very quickly. It’s the first song that I ever composed, and I wrote the entire melody myself,” he said proudly.
Although it may seem like Jimin is singing the song to someone else, he’s actually singing it to himself. He said that RM’s most crucial contribution to the song—aside from writing all of the English lines—was changing the word “me” to “you,” because “Promise” started out as a song Jimin wrote because he wanted to address his frustration with himself. But when he had that epiphany while on tour, Jimin decided to switch gears and write a comforting song instead.
“I hopes lots of people would listen to the song and that it would comfort them as well. That was what I had in mind while I was working on it, and that’s how I was able to think of the exact words I wanted to say. That’s how the song ‘Promise’ came into existence.”
Jimin has since started playing a more active role in writing new material for BTS. He helped write “Friends” and “Dis-ease” on their chart-topping albums Map of the Soul: 7 and BE, respectively.
He dropped “Christmas Love” last December, and he called it a Christmas present to ARMY. Jimin went on to reveal that it was inspired by how he felt the first time he saw snow. He added that he wanted to give people a chance to relive the innocence and joy they felt as kids, which is most likely something they don’t get to do as adults.
In typical Jimin fashion, the song—which features the kind of bells often heard in Christmas carols, plus a sweet, twinkling melody—came complete with a sweet message. He wrote, “Everyone, you are all worthy of always being loved. I worked hard on this song with the wish that everyone can be happy.”
On August 15, ARMY trended the hashtag #Jimin1BillionAudioStreams, to celebrate the fact that the five solo songs he released on SoundCloud, Spotify, and YouTube earned a grand total of 1,000,000,000 streams—a feat made more impressive by the fact that none of those songs were heavily promoted. He’s the first and so far only Korean act in history to achieve this.
The other members of BTS’s vocal line (Jin, Jungkook, and V) have either expressed a desire to release a mixtape or already started making one. Jimin hasn’t said anything about releasing more solo songs, but he should. He clearly has the talent for it—not to mention the heart.