Ten years of R&B, an unmistakable voice and no agency: the Korean singer-songwriter talks to Koreami about Talking Book 2, his fourth album, and about choosing to protect his own creative time.
Put on any jeebanoff song in your headphones. What’s the first thing that strikes you? For me, it was not being able to tell straight away whether the person singing was a man or a woman. A clear, crystalline, hypnotic tone. Korean critics have been describing it with the same word for years, androgynous.
jeebanoff is thirty-three, he comes from Ansan, and in ten years he has released four albums, six EPs and a long run of singles without ever signing with an agency. In Korea the critics know him: in 2017 he won a Korean Music Award, the country’s main critics’ prize, in a category that also featured Dean and Jay Park. R&B listeners know him too, and have followed him ever since. In Italy, still few know him. Too few.
On 21 September he released Talking Book 2, his fourth album. I had been trying to interview him for two years. This time he said yes, so I asked him about the record, about the producer he made it with, and about why he stays away from the stage.
Voice
When Arena asked him years ago why, among Korea’s many alternative R&B artists, he was the one getting noticed, he answered that it was probably the voice. The way he uses vocal technique — the unusual vibrato, the bent notes Korean singers call kkeokgi — comes down to a simple idea. “It’s not that I’m constantly keeping track of things, thinking, I’ve done this twice already, I absolutely can’t do it a third time,” he tells me. “I just believe that something becomes attractive partly because it doesn’t appear too often. So when I’m writing a song and come up with an interesting vocal technique, I tend to think that using it once or twice might give people another reason to listen to the song.” It is probably why his records sound so unbothered about impressing you.
Reviewing Misery, the magazine IZM opened by noting that anyone can now generate a voice with AI and that polishing a vocal with technology has become the default. He goes the other way: nothing to fix, nothing to add, a tone you recognise after three seconds.
When he couldn’t sing
It took Lee Jae-min four years to convince his parents to let him make music, and once he got into the industry he spent about a year and a half as a trainee at a label that, as he told Rhythmer in 2017, had him running errands and cleaning without letting him perform or sing on anyone else’s records. Even then he recorded in a restrained way, because the emphatic neo-soul delivery felt out of place on what he was writing.
When he left, he wrote 삼선동 사거리: a boy in a basement room listens to the Billboard charts, hoping to end up on them one day. In 2017 that song won him the Korean Music Award for Best R&B and Soul Song, the critics’ prize that looks at records and ignores sales. He was twenty-four and had one EP to his name.
The stage name comes from the same period. At first he went by jeeban, then he added off, from the English get off, meaning to leave. He explained to Big Issue that the name stands for leaving behind the person he had been and starting again, after a stretch in which he lived in deep isolation and had few chances to see anyone.
From then on he barely stopped: GOOD THING. in 2019, VOID. in 2021 shortly before his military service, Misery in 2025, nominated at February’s Korean Music Awards, plus three K-Drama soundtracks. The work he holds closest is still the 2018 EP 주마등 : 走馬燈, written with his aunt’s husband in mind: he was vice-principal of Danwon High School at the time of the Sewol disaster, and died shortly afterwards.
In 2019 a Korean cultural foundation asked him to cover a 1988 ballad for a project on forgotten songs. That cover, 추억속의 그대, has close to twelve million streams on Spotify, more than any song he wrote himself, and it is the door through which a great many people walked into the rest of his catalogue. It was arranged by plan8, the same producer behind the new album.
Solo
Today jeebanoff has no agency: he produces himself, handles the creative direction, mixes his own vocals, and POCLANOS takes care of distribution. On Spotify he has around 186,000 monthly listeners: nowhere near K-Pop, absolutely considerable for someone with nobody behind him.
I asked him what independence costs him and what it gives him, expecting the story of an artist who escaped a suffocating contract. His old label, he says, never restricted his freedom; if anything it let him think about nothing but the music. The problem was elsewhere.
I’d make the music, but once I handed over the master files, the project would leave my hands until its release. Somewhere along the way, it would be packaged, refined, and handled by other people, becoming something else in the process
He wants to be there until the last step before the listener. In the Korean agency system the artist sits at the centre of a machine that handles image, content, schedule and audience, and leaves them only the creative work: he took precisely the part that usually gets delegated, and admits it is sometimes too much. Talking Book 2 is the first chapter of the series made with that control in his hands, since in 2020 the executive producer was the label.
Two rooms, one door
The working method, on the other hand, hasn’t changed. He and plan8 share a studio, him in Room B and plan8 in the control room next door, and in a year they may spend fewer than fifteen days working in the same room. Everything else happens online.
Apart from the arrangement side of things, I don’t involve myself in beat-making at all, not even one percent. Likewise, plan8 has absolutely no say in my toplines or the way I record my vocals. We simply work on our respective parts, and when we’re done, we share them with each other and say, sounds good, let’s put them together. I think it’s possible because we trust each other’s individual instincts in the areas where we’re each good at what we do
In the Instagram post announcing the record he had called plan8 “the other owner of this album”, and when I asked what he meant he said it is literal: if the songs were people, one of them would be the mother and the other the father.
I like playing in the room he’s prepared for me, without going beyond what that space calls for. I don’t want to overdo it or play things up too much. I want to become someone who belongs in that space
Even the way he answered me says something about him: he writes with a line break at almost every sentence, and the result looks like his songs, short lines and no sentence stretched out to look good.
Six years later
Talking Book came out in December 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, with no way to promote it, and still became one of his most-streamed records. Rhythmer described it as an after-the-breakup account, with a title that worked like a diary. That unpromoted success left him with a question: does good music, in the end, find its own way? The second chapter started from the same intention as the first, making music the two of them would enjoy listening to.
In February he had told IZM he had been working on it for three years, and when I asked him about it he corrected the count: “If you’re asking whether we spent three full years making this album, absolutely not.” The oldest song might be three years old, others are a month old, and all of them were finished in the same summer.
There is no hidden plot running between the two records, however tempting it is to look for one: they share a similar texture and similar themes, and for him that was enough to make them a series. The only echo he allows is a sonic one: 그냥 잠깐 / Lost & Found, released in June and then placed first on the album, opens with piano comping that gave him the same immediate pleasure as the opening of 난 아니야 / NOT ME!, the track that opened the first chapter.
The title doesn’t hide much either. It comes from Stevie Wonder’s 1972 album, the record of his life, and it is not a sonic reference: he used it hoping someone might grow as attached to his album as he is to the one he loves.
And now, I feel like Talking Book has gradually developed an identity of its own as a jeebanoff album, too. That makes me happy
The hard part was recording the older songs, because in the meantime he had changed more than they had.
The nuances I wanted to convey had changed so much that the versions of me, of jeebanoff, from the original guide recordings no longer reflected what I wanted to hear. At a certain point, I stopped listening to the guides altogether and continued working with completely new recordings
There will be no third chapter: past number two, he says, the focus starts to fade and people get confused about which song belongs to which record.
Live/ No Live
Apart from one festival two years ago, jeebanoff hasn’t played live since before the pandemic. Next time, and these are rare, will be abroad, and shared: on 30 October he’s at Circus Tokyo on a triple bill with ELDON and Kim Seungmin. He had told IZM that early on it felt strange to sing in front of a crowd and be paid for it, and when I asked whether anything had changed, he said no.
I think I’m the kind of person who finds it difficult to fully enjoy singing in front of a large audience. For me to keep doing this work without losing myself, I feel that I need much more time to make albums, and that time is far more important to me
He does hope the day will come for a concert of his own and, further ahead, a European tour. A few lines later, asked what he would like an Italian listener to take away from the record, he answered by talking about being seen.
I believe that existence is affirmed through being observed by someone, and that the reason I can keep doing this work is that my fans allow me to exist in that way
The two kinds of looking are not the same. The one you get on stage is immediate and measured in people shouting; the one he cares about is delayed, silent, made of someone opening a record again years later. The bet has a price: the attention economy rewards constant presence, in Korea as in Japan as here, and an artist who doesn’t play live gives up the main source of independent income. What’s left is streaming, soundtracks and word of mouth, and the model holds as long as the records keep circulating on their own.
Why they circulate, not even he knows. It is the question he has carried since 2020: does good music find its way, or did that record land in the right playlist at the right moment? Without the platforms’ data we will never find out. Since 2020 he has worked as if the answer were only one: in the end, good music finds its way.
I think everyone in this world has experienced some kind of separation at least once. If we were to divide the emotions associated with those goodbyes into ten different categories, perhaps one of them would be found somewhere in this album. I made this series with the hope that at least one person might find something they can relate to in it. And if someone needs to feel understood or comforted through a particular kind of emotion, perhaps a certain song will come to mind, and they’ll open up my Talking Book again
Three doors towards jeebanoff
Love game, title track di Talking Book 2 · 오늘은 / The Day, da Misery · Sangenjaya, di CHANGMO con lui e Paul Blanco
Author’s note — While we were working on this interview, the deluxe edition of Talking Book 2 came out: five more tracks than the original release, and it’s an incredible piece of work. You’ll find it below.
