What Does Love Mean to Jung Eunji? 'Summer, I' Has Her Answer

Apink's Jung Eunji knows what people expect from her: soaring high notes, emotional ballads and, more often than not, "Hopefully Sky." For her first solo album in three years and nine months, however, she decided not to chase those expectations.

"I kept thinking about the songs I'm best known for and the high notes that people like to hear from me," Jung Eunji said during a media listening session for her fifth mini album, "Summer, I." "But I started thinking about what I could keep doing without getting tired of it." The answer was to make something closer to what she actually likes.

That idea is clearest on the title track, "i love LOVE," a band-driven song built around the phrase "I love love." The song began with Jung Eunji wondering what kind of person she was when it came to love. When she asked people around her, many told her she seemed like someone who would be cool and detached in relationships. Her own answer was different. To Jung Eunji, love includes not only the good moments but also the waiting, disappointment and hurt that come with caring about someone.

"I think the most important thing about love is doing something despite everything," she said. "There are times when taking care of someone or expressing yourself can feel like a hassle. But you do it anyway."

Across the rest of the album, Jung Eunji approaches that idea from different angles. She steps into bossa nova on "linguine," written and composed by Kwon Jung Yeol, while "with the wind," made with Jukjae, revisits the world of her 2016 solo debut song "Hopefully Sky." The latter imagines the child from that song as an adult, with references to the older song woven into the lyrics. "I wanted the child from 'Hopefully Sky' to have a happy ending," Jung Eunji said, adding that people close to her who heard the track told her, "This sounds like you."

The album gradually moves away from the lighter side of summer as it reaches songs about breakups and what remains afterward. Jung Eunji said she did not want to make those emotions overly dramatic, instead treating sadness as something that comes, stays for a while and eventually passes. She chose to close the album with "empty," which captures the emptiness left behind after a relationship ends. Rather than wrapping up a summer album on an upbeat note, Jung Eunji wanted that sense of absence to linger.

"Summer, I" arrives as Jung Eunji celebrates 15 years with APINK while continuing to grow as a singer-songwriter. She remains modest about how far she has come. "I don't think my songwriting skills are outstanding yet," she said. "But people have told me they like the songs I've written, so I started thinking, 'Maybe I've grown a little?'"

Jung Eunji described herself as someone who grows little by little. With "Summer, I," that growth comes through not in how high she can sing, but in how much of herself she can put into the music.