Sweet Like Cookies, my first song born from memory

Life became difficult in many ways from 2023 onward.

After my wife passed away, I stayed inside for a long time. I experienced panic attacks, and there were days when distancing myself from reality felt like the only way to endure it. Time kept moving, but mine seemed to have stopped.

About a year later, I began writing lyrics from the moments that reminded me of her. I could not fit our entire life into one song, so I returned to the very beginning.

The first time I saw her photograph. I wanted to preserve that brief, unmistakable spark in a song.

After seeing her photograph for the first time, I began pursuing her. I had fallen for her completely.

Like two strangers passing in the street

I retold our first meeting as a different scene.

On his way home, a well-dressed man sees a beautiful woman walking toward him. Their eyes meet for a moment. His heart races, and before he even knows her name, he imagines an entire future with her.

I turned the spark I felt when I first saw my wife’s photograph into a scene of falling for a stranger passing on the street. Rather than explain the memory exactly as it happened, I wanted it to unfold like a short film.

If you listen closely, you can hear the man’s steady footsteps. I also expressed the man walking in the lyrics through sound.

I also slipped a joke that a friend on social media once made into the lyrics: when a man meets a woman, he immediately starts dreaming about the future.

The story inside three lines

My heart is thumpin’, it’s skippin’ a beat

It means his heart is racing so hard with excitement that it cannot even keep the beat.

I’m already grandpa, wrinkled and gray

They have barely exchanged a glance, yet he has already imagined their distant future by himself. In the music video, I portrayed it through the backs of two people growing old together with affection.

But that daydream was sweet like cookies

It represents iljangchunmong: a sweet daydream that passes in an instant.

The turn hidden inside a bright song

The music and lyrics are bright on the surface. His heartbeat moves lightly, and the daydream is sweet like a cookie.

But the fantasy does not last. She walks past him, and he heads home alone again. The brief magic fades, leaving only its sweetness behind.

Life can pass in ways that run against our hopes. I wanted the tender fantasy and the lonely reality to exist in the same song.

Perhaps that was also how I felt about memory. Our time together had ended, but the feeling of that first spark had not disappeared.

A music video that existed in my head first

The first inspiration for the music video came from Singin' in the Rain. Its image of a man carrying an umbrella as he walks down a street after the rain helped me picture the scenes in the song.

As I wrote the lyrics, I could already see the music video clearly: a man in a suit holding an umbrella, two people passing one another, and an imagined future appearing for a moment before fading away.

The opening and closing scenes of the music video are deliberately different. It begins with the two people facing each other and ends with them in crossed positions, turned away from one another. The saxophone player in the middle represents the song’s instrumental break and becomes the dividing line between those two scenes.

Finishing both the song and the video by myself took time.

I created the images with Midjourney. Precise composition and narrative mattered more to me than making every shot move naturally, so I chose a sequence of still images. I shaped each angle, glance, and transition until the result came close to the film I had imagined.

I first sketched all the lyrics in Korean, then used a translator to build the English version. A direct translation would not sing well, so I kept revising the words to preserve their meaning while making the pronunciation, length, and rhyme flow naturally.

The process reminded me how much lyrics determine the direction of a song. I still write down new lines whenever inspiration comes.

Putting my name in my first song

Sweet Like Cookies, released on July 1, 2025, is my first song.

I boldly put my own name in its opening line.

My name is Daegyu, I’m walking the lane

It felt a little embarrassing, but I did not want to hide where the song began. It came from my own memory and carries a feeling I wanted to share directly.

I hope this song might become a small serenade for someone in love. I want to use the song as a vessel so the spark I once held can reach another person’s heart.

In one line: I reached into a time that had stopped and made a song from the first spark I once felt. I hope this sweet memory becomes a small serenade in someone else's love story.