Bill Rahko, who works with us, I had asked him if he ever had any bits of music lying around. He had a bit of music and a little bit of melody. I was listening to his loop that he’d made and the chorus came into my head, “You, you are, my universe.” And I was like, well, if I sing “you,” then someone else should sing that back right away: “You, you, you are, you are,” like that.
I’d got a message that BTS were looking for a song — which wasn’t true. And I thought, don’t be ridiculous. That would never work. Don’t be crazy. But it stuck in my head. Anyway, the song was about people who are told they can’t be together — whether that’s Romeo and Juliet, or interracial couples, or interfaith couples, or places where there’s no LGBTQ permission. It felt like the coolest person to sing that song with would be someone who we’re not supposed to be with. It turned out to be the most uplifting, natural collaboration. I would do anything for those guys at any time. They were so good. They made the song so great.
A bit embarrassingly, I tried to sing fake Korean in the break in the pre-chorus — which I hope no one ever hears, because A, it’s probably wrong to do that on some level, and B, it sounded ridiculous. But then I called RM from BTS and said, “Here’s how it goes.” And he said, “No problem.” They wrote their lyrics and then all their ad-libs. My goddaughter educated me about ARMY and who everyone was. By the time I got to Seoul, I really knew about the rap team and I was like, well, we have to have a section where Suga and J-Hope can do some rapping. It was so fun in the studio. At first everyone was really nervous of each other, like, “What is this?” And there’s cameras everywhere in their world. But by the end, it was like, oh, this was always meant to be. Now we’re a boy band of seven really good-looking young Koreans and one old white guy, and it’s totally fine.
We just follow the song where the song wants to go — even if that song makes you fly to Korea to work with a boy band, knowing that in doing so you’re destroying any shred of cool or credibility and you risk upsetting their fans too. That’s the philosophy that we live by … I think with all of these songs we’ve chosen for this, they’ve all been allowed to be themselves, and the identity of the band has grown to accommodate that. So now, if we said, “Oh, we want to do a song with One Direction,” no one would think anything of it. I don’t think that’s possible right now, because they’ve gone in five directions. But it’s fun to let the band grow.
