Song: "They Never Know" by EXO
Album: EX`ACT - The 3rd Album
Composer: Paul 'MARZ' Thompson, MZMC, De-Capo Music Group, Jamil 'Digi' Chammas, Adrian Mckinnon, Tay Jasper, Levan Kali, Otha Vakseen' Davis III
Lyricist: 조윤경
Arranger: Paul 'MARZ' Thompson, De-Capo Music Group, Jamil 'Digi' Chammas
Q: Tell me about the birth of this song.MZMC: I was at a song camp and I had this track that the SM A&R loved, but I couldn't get any songwriters to write to it. Objectively speaking, there was nothing special about the track at that time because it was still a sketch, but I guess the SM A&R saw potential. So, I kept telling my songwriters to write to it, and they'd say they would, and then never get around to it (laughs). They wanted to write to the tracks I had that they thought were hot. Finally, on the last day of the song camp, at like 4am, I was able to convince them to get in a room and finish the song.
Q: Was the song intended for EXO?
MZMC: At the time, Taemin's album was about to come out. So, it was actually intended for him. The song was fixed to be on Taemin's Press It - The 1st Album album, but later it got dropped and disappeared for like 8 months. So, recently I went to another song camp and, thinking that SM wasn't going to use the song, we wrote a completely new melody to the track. And literally a week after we finished the new version, SM called me and told me they wanted the original version for EXO (laughs). I felt so bad because I had just wasted the songwriter's time writing the new melody.
Q: This song created a bit of fanwar between EXO fans and BTS fans. Can you shed any light on that?
MZMC: I'd love to! So, producers often use what are called sound libraries. These libraries include different drum sounds, drum loops, synth loops, guitar loops, piano loops, etc. They're shared across the web for producers to use, for free, without having to credit or ask for permission from the original maker of that sound or loop. They're royalty free. So, if a drum sound or a loop is hot, they'll often get used by multiple producers. The electric piano loop that I used was from one of those sound libraries. Since I don't listen to every single Kpop song that gets released, I was unaware that BTS' song, 고엽 (Dead Leaves), had the same loop. A lot of fans think that both the producer of Dead Leaves and I sampled Blackbear's Deadroses. That's not the case. It just turned out that all three of us used the same loop from the same sound library.Source: themusicmind.com![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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