In fact, I’ve always believed that everyone’s stories
and all the lyrics are kind of imbued in one whole story in my music,
and, this time around, it truly felt that everyone’s stories and all of the stories combined
came together through my songs and that really just evolved into music
and I believe that that just culminated into the title, 'The Story.'
Simply speaking, in terms of the music code and the genre,
overall I believe it’s much more of a relaxed and comfortable vibe
because it’s a medium tempo music.
The overall ambience and the feeling of the overall album is very much akin to the springtime,
and I think that it’s a good album for this season in spring.
I believe that it’s very much natural and all of the tracks,
all of the songs that come one after another, are very natural
as well as how they come after one another.
Hey, MTV News. I'm Kang Daniel
and these are my top 5 musical influences.
My first favorite musical influence is
fans. (laughing) My fans.
My fans because without my fans I would literally not exist
and I would be very limited in all of the subjects that I would be singing and thinking about
in terms of writing lyrics.
Because I have their support and they cheer me on,
I have unlimited imagination and I can really just explore
with freedom what I can do with my music.
So the first is my fans.
My next favorite musical influence is
my label.
(laughing)
My label because, well, I thought a lot into it but,
we're really one team and we are this crew
that we've been holding on together since the beginning.
We've been together, we're just one really tight-knit group
and they've been supporting me throughout this process of the album.
They give me so much inspiration and I get so much support from them
and I have so much thanks to give to them and
without them I don't think that I would get any inspiration.
Third is
my family.
My mother, father. I don't have any siblings,
but I believe that through this process, my family has taught me a lot
because I think that I was a child that didn't really have a sense of
responsibility at first.
But, through making a full album, it really made me a bit more mature as a person
and it made me want to look after my family and become a
more responsible person as well.
Another favorite musical influence is
movies.
It's not just one movie or one piece of a movie, but it was multiple movies,
because even with just one Star Wars movie
and with just one scene with two space ships going at each other
and with just one scene from the Star Wars movie, I had so much inspiration and
a lot of imagination just shooting through my head.
And I think,
going back in hindsight, all of the songs that I had released all had
some sort of inspiration at least from one scene from a movie.
I think that I can link them to some movie that I have seen before.
I get a lot of visual clues from the movies that I see,
so movies are definitely of inspiration.
And finally, my last favorite musical influence is
my cats. (laughing)
I'm not joking.
I mentioned that family was one of the inspirations and
my family taught me a lot about getting responsibility
and becoming more mature as a person.
I really did get a lot of inspiration from my cats.
They're still family
and I believe that one part of having my cats
as part of the family is when I go home after a long day,
they are the beings that truly are the happiest to see me
and they give me all this joy after a hard-working day.
And that kind of connection that I have with my cat is
huge psychological and emotional support that provides
this tremendous healing that I can get from them.
And a lot of the timelessness, or a lot of the stories
that I write about in my music is, in fact,
a lot of the inspiration from my cats.
I think my fans would like “1000x” the most.
It has a lot of meaning to it.
It's really a song that my fans would like the most.
If you think about it or think back to when I first started,
if they became my fans from the first day onwards,
it's almost at the time when it hits the thousand day mark
when this album will be released, and that's what I had in mind.
So, with this full album, I think that this has been dedicated to my fans as well.
So, I believe that they will appreciate this song the most.
Through the Color trilogy,
I tried to challenge myself to try and find things
that I hadn't done before and try to find different colors
that would fit myself and I tried to fit myself into those colors.
But this time around it was more of a natural process,
it really felt natural working on this album and
it really just came all naturally because one,
it was a full album, and I personally thought that I had grown.
I’m not sure if I can actually say this by myself,
but I really felt that I grew through this process of
creating this album and I really felt proud of myself.